Narrating Death

Daniel K. Jernigan is Associate Professor of English Literature at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He has written extensively on Tom Stoppard, including his monograph, Tom Stoppard: Bucking the Postmodern (2013). He also edited Flann O’Brien: Plays and Teleplays (2013), and Aidan Higgins’s collection of radio plays, Darkling Plain: Texts for the Air (2010).Walter Wadiak is Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College. He specializes in Middle English literature and has written for Exemplaria, Philological Quarterly, and Glossator. His book, Savage Economy: The Returns of Middle English Romance (Notre Dame, 2016), examines the afterlives of chivalric culture in late-medieval English romances.W. Michelle Wang is Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University’s School of Humanities, English. She received her Ph.D from The Ohio State University and was postdoctoral fellow at Queen Mary University of London, specializing in postmodern and contemporary fiction. She has published articles in the journals Narrative, Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Journal of Narrative Theory.

"The editors offer a valuable, singular study probing strategies for negotiating the unknowable passage from life to death as depicted in a diverse range of international literary classics. Emphasizing aesthetic devices and philosophical underpinings used by authors of each literary classic chosen, the conception of death as a passage exposes the limits and transformative qualities of death, that ‘uncrossable border.’ This is a major study certain to inspire scholars to pursue further examinations of this most universal of journeys."-- James Fisher, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• List of ContributorsIntroductionDANIEL K. JERNIGAN, WALTER WADIAK, and W. MICHELLE WANGPART IThe Uncrossable Border1 Photography and First-Person Death: Derrida, Barthes, PoeKEVIN RIORDAN2 "This memoryall men may have in mynd": Everyman and the Work of MourningWALTER WADIAK3 From Nothing to Never? Facing Death in King LearMICHAEL NEILL4 "Is there no danger in counterfeiting death?": Molière’s The Imaginary InvalidDANIEL K. JERNIGANPART IITrajectories5 "She is the God of Calvin, she sees the beginning and the end": Narrating Life and Death in the Fiction of Muriel SparkJOSEPH H. O’MEALY6 Talking to the Dead: Narrative Closure and the Political Unconscious in Neil Jordan’s FictionKEITH HOPPER7 Samuel Johnson and the Grammar of DeathLAURA DAVIES8 Death and Romance in Sir OrfeoELIZABETH ALLENPART IIIAesthetic Crossings9 Death and the Maidens: John Banville’s Ekphrastic StoryworldsNEIL MURPHY10 Blood Meridian, the Sublime, and Aesthetic Narrativizations of DeathW. MICHELLE WANG11 Murder Amidst the Chocolates: Martin McDonagh’s Multifaceted Uses of Death in In BrugesWILLIAM C. BOLES12 The Ruined Voice in Tom Murphy’s BailegangaireCHERYL JULIA LEEIndex