Description
Book SynopsisHow to Do Things with Dead People studies human contrivances for representing and relating to the dead. Alice Dailey takes as her principal objects of inquiry Shakespeare''s English history plays, describing them as reproductive mechanisms by which living replicas of dead historical figures are regenerated in the present and re-killed. Considering the plays in these terms exposes their affinity with a transhistorical array of technologies for producing, reproducing, and interacting with dead thingstechnologies such as literary doppelgängers, photography, ventriloquist puppetry, X-ray imaging, glitch art, capital punishment machines, and cloning.
By situating Shakespeare''s historical drama in this intermedial conversation, Dailey challenges conventional assumptions about what constitutes the context of a work of art and contests foundational models of linear temporality that inform long-standing conceptions of historical periodization and teleological ord
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Luminous Spiral and the Cigarette Box, or Technologies of the Afterdeath
1. Little, Little Graves: Shakespeare's Photographs of Richard II
2. Haunted Histories: Dramatic Double Exposure in Henry IV, Parts One and Two
3. Dummies and Doppelgängers: Performing for the Dead in 1 Henry VI
4. The King Machine: Reproducing Sovereignty in 3 Henry VI
5. Fuck Off and Die: The Queercrip Reign of Richard III
Postscript: Lazarus Again
