Narrating Death: The Limit of Literature (Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature)

Drawing on literary and visual texts spanning from the twelfth century to the present, this volume of essays explores what happens when narratives try to push the boundaries of what can be said about death. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Series Page 3 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Dedication 6 Contents 8 List of Contributors 10 Introduction 14 PART I: The Uncrossable Border 22 1 Photography and First-Person Death: Derrida, Barthes, Poe 24 2 “This memory all men may have in mynd”: Everyman and the Work of Mourning 40 3 From Nothing to Never: Facing Death in King Lear 56 4 “Is there no danger in counterfeiting death?”: Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid 75 PART II: Trajectories 88 5 “She is the God of Calvin, she sees the beginning and the end”: Narrating Life and Death in the Fiction of Muriel Spark 90 6 Talking to the Dead: Narrative Closure and the Political Unconscious in Neil Jordan’s Fiction 104 7 Samuel Johnson and the Grammar of Death 120 8 Death and Romance in Sir Orfeo 139 PART III: Aesthetic Crossings 160 9 Death and the Maidens: John Banville’s Ekphrastic Storyworlds 162 10 Blood Meridian, the Sublime, and Aesthetic Narrativizations of Death 174 11 Murder Amidst the Chocolates: Martin McDonagh’s Multifaceted Uses of Death in In Bruges 189 12 The Ruined Voice in Tom Murphy’s Bailegangaire 202 Index 220