Fictional Death and the Modernist Enterprise

ISBN-13: 9780521442619 / Angielski / Twarda / 1995 / 354 str.

A. Friedman; Alan Warren Friedman

Opis

Death and dying once seemed definitive, public, and appropriate; but the Industrial Revolution, the Great War, and the reenvisioning of reality by scientists and philosophers destabilized cultural norms. In Fictional Death and the Modernist Enterprise Friedman traces the semiotics of death and dying in twentieth-century fiction, history, and culture. He describes how modernist writers either elided rituals of dying, or, rediscovering the body, transformed Victorian "aesthetic death" into modern "dirty death." And he shows how, through postmodern fiction and AIDS narratives, death has once again become cultural currency.

Recenzje

"...an ambititous, intelligent work with a far broader scope than its title suggests. Drawing upon an array of canonical works throughout Western literature as well as a trove of extra-literary materials, Friedman provides a rich and informative context for evaluating the treatement of death, or the absence of treatment, in modernist literature." English Literature in Transition 1880-1920

Spis treści

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Fictional death and the modernist enterprise; 2. Climactic death; 3. The ars moriendi; 4. Dying in bed; 5. Artifices of mortality; 6. Funerals and stories; 7. Life after life; 8. Survivors of apocalypse; 9. E. M. Forster; 10. Virginia Woolf; 11. Late modernism: Graham Greene; 12. Late modernism: Lawrence Durrell; 13. Postmodernism: history, chaos and death; Notes; Bibliography; Index.