Interlude: Necromanticism and Romantic Authorship

Abstract

This intermezzo adds to scholarship on the theory and practice of Romantic authorship, pointing out effects of necromantic tourism on popular conceptions of writers. A distinctly Romantic “death of the author” emerged from touristic reader-author interactions. Sometimes comical, sometimes poignant, literary tourists’ commerce with writers taught authors that their death was a central fact of their celebrity. Necromantic tourism thus appealed simultaneously to two opposing models: on the one hand, it celebrated authors’ singularity, but on the other it insisted on authors’ fundamental commonalities with each other.