Obituaries as ‘Paper Monuments’: Online Research Seminar by Dr Rebecca Bullard (English Literature)

Paper Monuments: the Obituary as Memorial and Archive in Eighteenth-Century England

The obituary is one of the eighteenth century’s most significant, but least studied, contributions to print culture. In this talk, we’ll go on a guided tour of eighteenth-century obituaries, exploring the ways in which they were constructed, read, and used. I’ll show that obituary makers in this period are peculiarly self-conscious about the medium that their texts occupy – that is, about the fact that obituaries are memorials made out of paper. Rather than associating paper with ephemerality (as did some of the obituary’s early critics), I suggest that we should instead see obituaries as pioneering new ways of situating memorials in and through time. These texts prioritise and celebrate contingent and punctual acts of commemoration over the apparent durability of their close cousin, the memorial monument. This talk will be of interest to anyone whose research focuses on questions about mediation and memorialisation, as well as those with particular interests in eighteenth-century culture.

Dr Rebecca Bullard is Associate Professor of Eighteenth-Century English Literature in the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading.

Please join the seminar here using Microsoft Teams. Information on joining Teams meetings without an account can be found here.