Afterlife and narrative in contemporary fiction / Alice Bennett.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bennett, Alice, 1982-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Fiction--History and criticism.

Fiction.

Narration (Rhetoric).

Future life in literature.

Physical Description:

vi, 228 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Summary:

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 Amis's Time's Arrow to narration from heaven in Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. At the heart of the book is a focus on how the properties of the afterlife have become a tool for examining the capacities and conventions of narrative fiction. Modern novels carry the history of realism and its attempts to present life as it is, but many of the techniques which achieve these effects require perspective and positions for narration that are profoundly un-lifelike. Each chapter of the book takes a fresh look at problems in narrative theory, taking all its cues from experimental narratives set in the afterlife, from avant-garde experimentation to popular genre fiction. Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction examines, applies and refines anti-mimetic theories of fiction in readings of a group of texts which are after, but not in imitation of, life. Book jacket.

Contents:

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.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 214-222) and index.

ISBN:

9780230364240

0230364241

OCLC:

785786646