Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction

by Alice Bennett

Overview

Afterlife and Narrative 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 Amis's Time's Arrow to narration from heaven in Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones .

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349349357
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	01/01/2012
Edition description:	1st ed. 2012
Pages:	228
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

ALICE BENNETT Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature at Liverpool Hope University, UK. She taught modern literature and theory at Durham University, UK, where she also completed her PhD.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Afterlife Now Dead Endings: Making Meaning from the Afterlife Killing Time: Narrating Eternity After Effects: Purgatory, Prolepsis and the Past Tense Plotting Murder: Genre, Plot and the Dead Narrator Ghostwords: Mind-Reading and the Dead Narrator Death Writing: Deixis of Person and the Dead Narrator Here, There and Hereafter: Fictional Worlds and the Afterlife After Life Writing Appendix: Chronology of Primary Texts Notes Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

'Bennett's unique focus on 'after life' narratives provides valuable insight into some of the possible repercussions of writing fiction in a time of 'posts' (postmodernism, posthumanism, and even posthumousism. Between these "posts," Bennett demonstrates that after-life narratives have the ability to give a voice to the dispossessed, and to create a space of discursive experimentation for perspectives that are non-Christian and non-Western. After Life is essential reading for anyone interested in what comes after the death of the author.' - Professor Marcel O'Gorman, Department of English, University of Waterloo, Canada

From the Publisher