Fictional Death and the Modernist Enterprise

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Cambridge University Press, 1995 M01 26 - 339 pages
Cultures reveal themselves in how they react to death: how they ritualise it, tell its story, heal themselves. Before the modern period, death and dying seemed definitive, public, and appropriate. The industrial revolution, the Great War, and the radical reenvisioning of inner and outer reality after Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Einstein, van Gennep, and Freud, destabilized cultural norms and transformed the protocols of death and dying. In Fictional Death and the Modernist Enterprise Alan Friedman traces the semiotics of death and dying in twentieth-century fiction, history, and culture. He describes how modernist writers either, like Forster and Woolf, elided rituals of dying and death; or, rediscovering the body as Lawrence and Hemingway did, transformed Victorian 'aesthetic death' into modern 'dirty death'. And he goes on to show how, through postmodern fiction and AIDS narratives, death has once again become cultural currency.

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Contents

Fictional death and the modernist enterprise
5
The ars moriendi
47
Dying in bed
71
Artifices of mortality
87
Funerals and stories
117
Life after life
141
Survivors of apocalypse
165
E M Forster
186
Virginia Woolf
207
Lawrence Durrell
250
history chaos and death
266
Notes
283
Bibliography
305
Index
329
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