Bennett, Alice (2020) Literature and the Afterlife. In: The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature. Routledge Literature Companions . Routledge. ISBN 9780367619015
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
The literary afterlife is a genre in which a place and time after death are imagined and peopled with dead characters. Place it against the modern elegy, ghost story, or even zombie apocalypse, and the modern literary afterlife seems very much a minor literary form. Nevertheless, the afterlife has inspired a great range of writing and, historically, has served as one of the primary locations for the fantastic or supernatural in literature, from the Classical to the Medieval period. Epic poetry about purgatory, myths of descent into the underworld, stories of reincarnation, dream visions of paradise: all these represent a diverse tradition of writing across thousands of years.
What follows in this chapter takes George Saunders’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), as an example of a widely acclaimed literary afterlife from the contemporary moment and establishes a reading of the novel that foregrounds its genre elements. I read Lincoln in the Bardo as an afterlife to show how the book uses that genre’s (often very unconventional) conventions for handling voice, space, and time and to identify some of the ways in which the study of individual afterlives within their genre positioning can be generative and necessary.
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Faculty / Department: | Faculty of Creative Arts & Humanities > School of Humanities |
| Depositing User: | Alice Bennett |
| Date Deposited: | 21 Oct 2022 11:14 |
| Last Modified: | 05 Dec 2024 16:15 |
| URI: | https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/3655 |
Actions (login required)
 |
View Item |
Altmetric
Altmetric
