‘Representable justice’: Returning the dead and policing the city in some Victorian and contemporary elegies

Abstract

Elegy's roots in pastoral are widely-known but little critical attention has been given to the city in elegy. This is surprising since pastoral involves not only a dialectical relation between the city and the country but also, as Terry Gifford observes, ‘some form of retreat and return … in the sense that the pastoral retreat [returns] some insights relevant to the urban audience.’ Elegy is also concerned with the concept of ‘return’: the literal return of the dead to the city. This return not only enacts what Gillian Rose calls ‘representable justice’ but also enables the dead to have a continuing use that guarantees the continuation of the city. This essay examines how some nineteenth and twentieth century elegies explore and enact ideas of representable justice and of the dead's continuing value through either careful policing or contestation of the city's laws and borders.