Bridget English – författare

English sheds new light on death and dying in twentieth- and twenty-first century Irish literature as she examines the ways that Irish wake and funeral rituals shape novelistic discourse. She argues that the treatment of death in Irish novels offers a way of making sense of mortality and provides insight into Ireland's cultural and historical experience of death. Combining key concepts from narrative theory ""such as readers competing desires for a story and for closure"" with Irish cultural analyses and literary criticism, English performs astute close readings of death in select novels by Joyce, Beckett, Kate O'Brien, John McGahern, and Anne Enright. With each chapter, she demonstrates how novelistic narrative serves as a way of mediating between the physical facts of death and its lasting impact on the living. English suggests that while Catholic conceptions of death have always been challenged by alternative secular value systems, these systems have also struggled to find meaningful alternatives to the consolation offered by religious conceptions of the afterlife.

English sheds new light on death and dying in twentieth- and twenty-first century Irish literature as she examines the ways that Irish wake and funeral rituals shape novelistic discourse. She argues that the treatment of death in Irish novels offers a way of making sense of mortality and provides insight into Ireland's cultural and historical experience of death. Combining key concepts from narrative theory ""such as readers competing desires for a story and for closure"" with Irish cultural analyses and literary criticism, English performs astute close readings of death in select novels by Joyce, Beckett, Kate O'Brien, John McGahern, and Anne Enright. With each chapter, she demonstrates how novelistic narrative serves as a way of mediating between the physical facts of death and its lasting impact on the living. English suggests that while Catholic conceptions of death have always been challenged by alternative secular value systems, these systems have also struggled to find meaningful alternatives to the consolation offered by religious conceptions of the afterlife.

English sheds new light on death and dying in twentieth- and twenty-first century Irish literature as she examines the ways that Irish wake and funeral rituals shape novelistic discourse. She argues that the treatment of death in Irish novels offers a way of making sense of mortality and provides insight into Ireland’s cultural and historical experience of death. Combining key concepts from narrative theory—such as readers’ competing desires for a story and for closure—with Irish cultural analyses and literary criticism, English performs astute close readings of death in select novels by Joyce, Beckett, Kate O’Brien, John McGahern, and Anne Enright. With each chapter, she demonstrates how novelistic narrative serves as a way of mediating between the physical facts of death and its lasting impact on the living. English suggests that while Catholic conceptions of death have always been challenged by alternative secular value systems, these systems have also struggled to find meaningful alternatives to the consolation offered by religious conceptions of the afterlife.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.Establishing a new theoretical foothold at the crossroads of human, nonhuman, and posthuman studies in literary modernism, Ethical Crossroads in Literary Modernism broadens our current understanding of modernist ethics. Analysing a wide range of poetry, drama, prose fiction, and non-fiction writing, these essays expand the vertical and horizontal boundaries of modernist studies while addressing a number of the thematic concerns and critical approaches that are currently at the vanguard of modernist studies. These provocations, produced by both established critics and emerging scholars, include interrogations of the ethics of collaboration and influence through the lenses of queer theory, feminism, and ecocriticism, among others. The wide ranging geographical and interdisciplinary scope of this collection, which includes fields such as law and literature and animal studies, refreshes and reconfigures past debates on the positive influence and ethical failures of modernist literature for a new generation of researchers and students. This edited collection is the first book length study to use such an expansive and cutting-edge definition of modernist ethics and acts as both the definitive introduction to the topic and offers a series of original and ground-breaking essays.