Narrating Death

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.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE’S 100 BEST YA BOOKS OF ALL TIME The extraordinary, beloved novel about the ability of books to feed the soul even in the darkest of times. When Death has a story to tell, you listen. It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement. In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak, author of I Am the Messenger, has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time. “The kind of book that can be life-changing.” —The New York Times “Deserves a place on the same shelf with The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank.” —USA Today DON’T MISS BRIDGE OF CLAY, MARKUS ZUSAK’S FIRST NOVEL SINCE THE BOOK THIEF.

Jia Pingwa's novels have caused both fame and controversy throughout the Chinese speaking world. This pioneering study examines the corpus of Pingwa's writings, emphasizing his importance, prominence and relevance to modern Chinese society.

The history of the 1947 Indian/Pakistani partition is one of separation: a country and people newly divided. However, in telling this story, Anindya Raychaudhuri, the son of a partition participant, looks to unity, joining for the first time the public and private memory narratives of this pivotal moment in time. Narrating Partition features in-depth interviews with more than 120 individuals across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the United Kingdom, each reflecting on a direct or inherited experience of the 1947 Indian/Pakistani partition. Through the collection of these oral history narratives, Raychaudhuri is able to place them into comparison with the literary, cinematic, and artistic representations of partition, and in doing so, examine the ways this event is remembered, re-interpreted, and reconstructed--and the narrator's role in this process. These stories also reflect on the themes of home, family, violence, childhood, trains, and rivers within these public and private narratives. Crucially, Raychaudhuri is the first writer to use oral history in addressing the Bengal/Punjab partition as part of this same event, examining the memorial legacy in both the Bengali and Punjabi communities.

Contributions by Cécile Accilien, Maria Rice Bellamy, Gwen Bergner, Olga Blomgren, Maia L. Butler, Isabel Caldeira, Nadège T. Clitandre, Thadious M. Davis, Joanna Davis-McElligatt, Laura Dawkins, Megan Feifer, Delphine Gras, Akia Jackson, Tammie Jenkins, Shewonda Leger, Jennifer M. Lozano, Marion Christina Rohrleitner, Thomás Rothe, Erika V. Serrato, Lucía Stecher, and Joyce White Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat contains fifteen essays addressing how Edwidge Danticat’s writing, anthologizing, and storytelling trace, (re)construct, and develop alternate histories, narratives of nation building, and conceptions of home and belonging. The prolific Danticat is renowned for novels, collections of short fiction, nonfiction, and editorial writing. As her experimentation in form expands, so does her force as a public intellectual. Danticat’s literary representations, political commentary, and personal activism have proven vital to classroom and community work imagining radical futures. Among increasing anti-immigrant sentiment and containment and rampant ecological volatility, Danticat’s contributions to public discourse, art, and culture deserve sustained critical attention. These essays offer essential perspectives to scholars, public intellectuals, and students interested in African diasporic, Haitian, Caribbean, and transnational American literary studies. This collection frames Danticat’s work as an indictment of statelessness, racialized and gendered state violence, and the persistence of political and economic margins. The first section of this volume, “The Other Side of the Water,” engages with Danticat’s construction and negotiation of nation, both in Haiti and the United States; the broader dyaspora; and her own, her family’s, and her fictional characters’ places within them. The second section, “Welcoming Ghosts,” delves into the ever-present specter of history and memory, prominent themes found throughout Danticat’s work. From origin stories to broader Haitian histories, this section addresses the underlying traumas involved when remembering the past and its relationship to the present. The third section, “I Speak Out,” explores the imperative to speak, paying particular attention to the narrative form with which such telling occurs. The fourth and final section, “Create Dangerously,” contends with Haitians’ activism, community building, and the political and ecological climate of Haiti and its dyaspora.

The collection of articles compiled in this volume ponder narratological aspects, elements, and features and examine the extent to which the coinage “post-narratology” is applicable in contemporary literature, cultural studies, translation, etc. The contributors’ rethinking of narratology in relation to ethnicity, culture, history, and religion lead to significant implications as far as adherence to or departure from Western classical narratology is concerned. The notions of plot, storyline, point of view, voice, characters, narrators, and others, paradigmatically structured in the narratological classical model shaped by the Russian Formalists and polished by Tzvetan Todorov, Roland Barthes, and Gérard Genette, are stretched and modified to fit the cultural contexts of written works in various fields.

Narrative Fiction and Death: Dying Imagined offers a new perspective on the study of death in literature. It focuses on narrative fiction that conveys the experience of dying from the internal perspective of a dying protagonist. Writers from Victor Hugo in the early 1800s to Elif Shafak in the present day have imagined the unknowable final moments on the threshold to death. This literary study examines the wide range of narrative strategies used to evoke the transition from life to death, and to what effect, revealing not only each writer’s unique way of representing the dying experience; the comparative reading also finds common concerns in these texts and uncovers surprising parallels and unexplored intertextual relations between works across time and space that will interest comparatists as well as specialists in the literatures discussed. Students of individual texts examined here will benefit from detailed analyses of these works. The fictional evocation of dying addresses our basic human fears, offering catharsis, consolation, and a greater cognitive and emotional understanding of that unknowable experience. Presented in an engaging and highly readable manner, this study argues for literature’s potential to challenge our assumptions about the end of life and change our approach to dying, an aspect that will interest students and researchers of the health humanities, palliative caregivers, and all those interested in questions of the end of life.

Social death occurs when the social existence of a person or group ceases. With an individual, it can occur before or after physical death. Scholars in a wide range of disciplines have applied the concept to very diverse issues – including genocide, slavery, dementia, hospitalisation, and bereavement. Social death relates to social exclusion, social capital, social networks, social roles and social identity, but its theorising is not united – scholars in one field are often unaware of its use in other fields. This is the first book to bring a range of perspectives together in a pioneering effort to bring to the field conceptual clarity rooted in empirical data. Preceded by an original theoretical discussion of the concept of social death, contributions from the UK, Romania, Sweden, and Israel analyse the fourth age, end of life policies, dying alone at home, suicide, photographs on gravestones, bereavement, and the agency of dead musicians. This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Social Science.