Afterlife and narrative in contemporary fiction
By: Alice Bennett
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2012
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 228
ISBN-13: 9780230364240
Subjects: History and criticism; Narration (Rhetoric); Future life in literature; Fiction
Description: Afterlife and narrative in contemporary fiction explores why life after death is such a potent cultural concept today, and why it is such an attractive prospect for modern fiction. The book mines a rich vein of imagined afterlives, from the temporal experiments of Martin Amiss Times Arrow to narration from heaven in Alice Sebolds The Lovely Bones.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Afterlife now; title: Dead endings: making meaning from the afterlife; title: Killing time: narrating eternity; title: After effects: purgatory, prolepsis and the past tense; title: Plotting murder: genre, plot and the dead narrator; title: Ghostwords: mind-reading and the dead narrator; title: Death writing: deixis of person and the dead narrator; title: Here, there and hereafter: fictional worlds and the afterlife; title: After life writing.