Abstract
The chapter addresses the importance of unofficial sites of remembrance and memorialisation in modern culture, referring specifically to Cross Bones Graveyard in Southwark, London, as a case study of contemporary Gothic performance. As a contemporary unofficial shrine, the graveyard is invested with symbolic and political nuances, which has been co-opted by campaigners (including writers such as John Constable, and the International Union of Sex Workers) as a contemporary locus of remembrance, and will employ the critical framework of ‘object theory’, in which an object becomes a ‘thing’ distinct from its original experience. The plethora of objects left at Cross Bones—ribbons with inscriptions, photographs, beads, flowers, tin cans, popular cultural artefacts—testify to the reincorporation of discarded/useless items into symbols of feminism and historical recovery.
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Nally, C. (2018). The Forgotten Dead: Performance, Memory and Sites of Mourning at Cross Bones Graveyard. In: Jones, K., Poore, B., Dean, R. (eds) Contemporary Gothic Drama. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95359-2_10
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