ABSTRACT

This paper tries to retrace some of the most remarkable representations of

death in the Victorian English literature of the nineteenth century, with the aim of
developing an intertextual pattern of the contrastive nature of death as a hybrid
representation resulting of the combination of the aesthetics of the beautiful and
the macabre. Both forms of narrative representation use different means, but in
spite of this, these seemingly divergent fields are likely to coalesce, since they
share a common purpose: understanding and bringing sense into the transience
of existence and the mysteries of death. In order to prove and illustrate the key
points of this critical approach, a comparative analysis of some outstanding
literary works is performed, thus providing a clearer and applied sight on the
matter.

Keywords: death, Victorian literature, aesthetic representation, abject and the

sublime, the uncanny.