Death and tenses : posthumous presence in early modern France
Kenny, NeilAuthor
'Death and Tenses' explores the question of what tense we should use to refer to the dead. Focusing on 16th and early 17th century texts in French and Latin, it compares early modern examples with modern French and English, asking whether changes in more recent beliefs in posthumous survival have led to different tense usage.
Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph
Includes bibliographical references and index.
'Death and Tenses' explores the question of what tense we should use to refer to the dead. Focusing on 16th and early 17th century texts in French and Latin, it compares early modern examples with modern French and English, asking whether changes in more recent beliefs in posthumous survival have led to different tense usage.
Description based on online resource; title from home page (viewed on November 16, 2015).
List of illustrations -- Abbreviations: tense-forms -- Note on translation, style, and references. Introduction: inescapable tense. 1 Tense, death, survival : Modern tenses for the dead: towards a sketch -- The historiographical regime of disentanglement -- Surviving death in the early modern period -- Early modern tenses for the dead  : The perfectum -- time and tense -- perfectivity, imperfectivity, and the problem of perfectal meaning -- The passé simple and the passé composé -- Patterns of usage. 2 Dying, burying, mourning: tense and ritual : Tense and ritual -- Christ, the saints, meditation -- The Eucharist -- From funeral sermon to coronation -- Epitaphs -- Consolation literature. 3 Discursive remains : Actions: Exemplarity -- History -- The will to write and give: postmortem continuations -- Spoken words -- Written words : Ancients -- Moderns. 4 Authors : Rabelais - Montaigne. Conclusion: breaking through? Bibliography : Pre-1711 works -- Post-1710 works. Index.
French literature
French literature
Latin literature, Medieval and modern
Death in literature
Grammar, Comparative and general
French Literature
Romance Literatures
Languages & Literatures