The Melancholy Briton: Enlightenment Sources of the Gothic

Melancholy and foreboding about death is the performance of subjectivity. In eighteenth-century Britain there seems to be much cultural work devoted to death, and if this work is not as spectacular as in the Victorian period, it is interestingly less fully ritualized and containing. In general, Locke seems resistant to anything like Cartesian dualism, with its machine body/immaterial soul dichotomy. Death seems to be, for Locke, of the mind as …