Awful Parenthesis

Whether the rapt trances of Romanticism or the corpse-like figures that confounded Victorian science and religion, nineteenth-century depictions of bodies in suspended animation are read as manifestations of broader concerns about the unknowable in Anne C. McCarthy’s Awful Parenthesis . Examining various aesthetics of suspension in the works of poets such as Coleridge, Shelley, Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti, McCarthy shares important insights into the nineteenth-century fascination with the s