Writing death and absence in the Victorian novel
Subtitle: engraved narratives
By: Jolene Zigarovich
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2012
Place of publication: New York, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 199
ISBN-13: 9781137007025
Subjects: History and criticism; Criticism and interpretation; Death in literature; Dead in literature; English fiction
Description: This book argues that the Victorian novel offers an extended commentary on the complicity between writing and death. Drawing from theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, and Paul de Man, Zigarovich maintains that the narrating of death was important to the understanding of absence, separation, and displacement in an increasingly industrial and destabilizing culture.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: "A laboriously constructed skeleton": retrospection, loss and obituary in Villette; title: "It sounds as hollow as a coffin": the empty tomb in Bleak house; title: Wilkie Collins, narrativity, and epitaph; title: Memorialization and endlessness in Dickens's Our mutual friend; title: Edwin Drood: the seminal missing body.