Fictional Death and the Modernist Enterprise

This 1995 book analyses of the semiotics of death and dying in twentieth-century fiction, history and culture.

Alan Warren Friedman (Author)

9780521442619, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 January 1995

354 pages, 9 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.3 cm, 0.762 kg

"...an ambititous, intelligent work with a far broader scope than its title suggests. Drawing upon an array of canonical works throughout Western literature as well as a trove of extra-literary materials, Friedman provides a rich and informative context for evaluating the treatement of death, or the absence of treatment, in modernist literature." English Literature in Transition 1880-1920

Cultures reveal themselves in how they react to death: how they ritualize 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 re-envisioning 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, first published in 1995, 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.

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Fictional death and the modernist enterprise
2. Climactic death
3. The ars moriendi
4. Dying in bed
5. Artifices of mortality
6. Funerals and stories
7. Life after life
8. Survivors of apocalypse
9. E. M. Forster
10. Virginia Woolf
11. Late modernism: Graham Greene
12. Late modernism: Lawrence Durrell
13. Postmodernism: history, chaos and death
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]