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D. Jernigan, W. Wadiak, M. Wang, Narrating Death. The Limit of Literature

D. Jernigan, W. Wadiak, M. Wang, Narrating Death. The Limit of Literature

Publié le par Aurelien Maignant

Narrating Death. The Limit of Literature

Edited by Daniel K. Jernigan, Walter Wadiak, Michelle Wang

 

Routledge

ISBN : 9781138360365

212 p.

115 £

 

PRESENTATION

Drawing on literary and visual texts spanning from the twelfth century to the present, this volume of essays explores what happens when narratives try to push the boundaries of what can be said about death.

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction, DANIEL K. JERNIGAN

PART I : The Uncrossable Border

1 Photography and First-Person Death: Derrida, Barthes, Poe, KEVIN RIORDAN

2 "This memoryall men may have in mynd": Everyman and the Work of Mourning, WALTER WADIAK

From Nothing to Never? Facing Death in King Lear, MICHAEL NEILL

"Is there no danger in counterfeiting death?": Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid, DANIEL K. JERNIGAN

PART II : Trajectories

5 "She is the God of Calvin, she sees the beginning and the end": Narrating Life and Death in the Fiction of Muriel Spark, JOSEPH H. O’MEALY

Talking to the Dead: Narrative Closure and the Political Unconscious in Neil Jordan’s Fiction, KEITH HOPPER

Samuel Johnson and the Grammar of Death, LAURA DAVIES

Death and Romance in Sir Orfeo, ELIZABETH ALLEN

PART III : Aesthetic Crossings

Death and the Maidens: John Banville’s Ekphrastic Storyworlds, NEIL MURPHY

10 Blood Meridian, the Sublime, and Aesthetic Narrativizations of Death, W. MICHELLE WANG

11 Murder Amidst the Chocolates: Martin McDonagh’s Multifaceted Uses of Death in In Bruges, WILLIAM C. BOLES

12 The Ruined Voice in Tom Murphy’s Bailegangaire, CHERYL JULIA LEE

Index

 

REVIEWS

"The editors offer a valuable, singular study probing strategies for negotiating the unknowable passage from life to death as depicted in a diverse range of international literary classics. Emphasizing aesthetic devices and philosophical underpinings used by authors of each literary classic chosen, the conception of death as a passage exposes the limits and transformative qualities of death, that ‘uncrossable border.’ This is a major study certain to inspire scholars to pursue further examinations of this most universal of journeys."

-- James Fisher, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

 

EDITORS

Daniel K. Jernigan is Associate Professor of English Literature at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He has written extensively on Tom Stoppard, including his monograph, Tom Stoppard: Bucking the Postmodern (2013). He also edited Flann O’Brien: Plays and Teleplays (2013), and Aidan Higgins’s collection of radio plays, Darkling Plain: Texts for the Air (2010).

Walter Wadiak is Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College. He specializes in Middle English literature and has written for ExemplariaPhilological Quarterly, and Glossator. His book, Savage Economy: The Returns of Middle English Romance (Notre Dame, 2016), examines the afterlives of chivalric culture in late-medieval English romances.

W. Michelle Wang is Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University’s School of Humanities, English. She received her Ph.D from The Ohio State University, specializing in postmodern and contemporary fiction. She has published articles in the journal NarrativeReview of Contemporary Fiction, and Journal of Narrative Theory.