In April, the Universe’s own Renée Fox, Co-Director of the Dickens Project, Associate Professor in the UCSC Literature Department, and the Jordan-Stern Chair for Dickens and Nineteenth-Century Studies, was awarded the Northeast Victorian Studies Association’s (NVSA) Sonya Rudikoff Award for her 2023 book, The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature. The award is given for the best first book in Victorian Studies. Scholar Sonya Rudikoff was an active member of the NVSA, and the wife of Robert Gutman, whose family established the award in her honor. It has been given since 1999.
Fox says she was “honored and thrilled” to receive the Rudikoff prize, which was announced at the NVSA’s 2025 annual conference in Boston. “The list of scholars and books that have won is just extraordinary,” she said. “It's an amazing privilege to have my book be part of their company.” Attending the conference to receive the honor was special to her. “NVSA was the very first academic conference I attended when I was a graduate student,” she said, “so getting to return and have my book celebrated there felt really special.” The Association was lavish in its praise of Fox’s book, saying, “This remarkable study tackles the poetics of literary revival through one its most literal figures: the reanimation of the dead. Fox's account of ‘the resuscitative imagination’ in nineteenth-century fiction and poetry offers a compelling analogy for the operations of art as a medium that both historicizes and revives the past... Her work also intervenes thoughtfully in modern methodological debates about presentism, offering a vision of literary scholarship as ‘resuscitative reading’—reading that "exhumes [and] renews; ... [that] disintegrates distinctions between past and present; ... [that] brings back the dead as people."
When asked about the term “resuscitative reading,” Fox explained that it’s “an idea I cobble together from Eve Sedgwick, Rita Felski, and Victorian writers themselves, as a way for me to think about how literary criticism is always a relationship between reader and text. We are always bringing our own imaginations to bear on what we read, and the ideas that emerge come from us as much as they do from the things we read. As I was writing about these books where characters reflect on the effort and ethics of using their own energies to breathe new life into old corpses, I realized how productive those same reflections could be for me as I collected this unexpected group of old texts into a new story about how the historical imagination works.”
The group of texts includes works by the Shelleys, Browning, Dickens, Yeats, and Stoker. NVSA said, “Fox treats forms of historical self-consciousness made manifest in failed resurrections, zombie invasions, British museum poems, and more. The historical trajectory that she charts, from Romanticism to the Irish Literary Revival, also expands wonderfully our sense of the field and positions modernist Irish writers as knowing inheritors of a long Victorian tradition that desires to conjure ‘a second life for the past.’ It is one of the great gifts of Fox's writing that she is something of a necromantic herself: conferring vivid life on both literary art and its authors in prose that is by turns disarmingly colloquial and eloquently figurative.”
An odd mix of authors? Maybe. But Fox says her book isn’t just about gothic novels and monsters. “I definitely have my share of those—Frankenstein's creature, vampires, mummies—but one of the book's arguments is that reanimation isn't just a trope in gothic novels,” she said. “Instead, I argue that reanimation is a way that all kinds of writers navigate questions of history, and so alongside monster stories I write about dramatic monologues, realist fiction, museum poetry, and Irish Literary Revival literature.”
For Dickens lovers, The Necromantics includes a central chapter on Dickens called “Dickensian Zombies in Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend.” Says Fox, “It looks at the way late Dickens uses tropes of resurrection to call the lifelikeness of realism into question and to doubt the power of language to make new life out of character fragments and personal histories.” And, she hopes, it will give Dickens readers “a new way of thinking about why those two late novels are obsessed with graveyards, repetitions, and corpses that appear to—or really do—come back to life.”
The chapter has another connection to the Universe: “It started its life as a Dickens Universe lecture—in 2014, an Our Mutual Friend year, which was also the summer I was applying for this job at UCSC,” Fox said. “So it feels deeply embedded in, and indebted to, the Universe community.”
