Patrick Reilly – författare

This title was first published in 2003. This text explores the "dark, pessimistic truth that pervades the pages of modern texts", setting a theme of Dante's "Inferno" against the work of modern authors including Dostoyevsky, Hardy, Conrad, Wharton, Kafka, Camus, Waugh and Flannery O'Connor. The author's thesis is that these writers exhibit a hostility towards the reader, an anger that the reader should continue to be so deludedly happy when the writer has become so mortifyingly enlightened. At its most characteristic, Reilly demonstrates, modern fiction seems to achieve a savage satisfaction in inflicting this pain, to an extent that could be described as sadistic. Reilly traces what he calls this "punitive spirit" to a character in the "Inferno", Vanni Fucci, who suffering himself does his best to make Dante suffer too. Through the study he uses the "Inferno" as a guide to the prevailing attitudes in modern fiction, revealing a parallel between the prohibition of pity within the medieval poem and in the pages of modern texts.

This title was first published in 2003. This text explores the "dark, pessimistic truth that pervades the pages of modern texts", setting a theme of Dante's "Inferno" against the work of modern authors including Dostoyevsky, Hardy, Conrad, Wharton, Kafka, Camus, Waugh and Flannery O'Connor. The author's thesis is that these writers exhibit a hostility towards the reader, an anger that the reader should continue to be so deludedly happy when the writer has become so mortifyingly enlightened. At its most characteristic, Reilly demonstrates, modern fiction seems to achieve a savage satisfaction in inflicting this pain, to an extent that could be described as sadistic.

Bills of Mortality: Disease and Destiny in Plague Literature from Early Modern to Postmodern Times explores the dynamic between the fact of plague and the constructs of destiny deadly disease generates in literary texts ranging from Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. The volume is of interest to readers in both literary and scientific, especially medical, fields. In addition, it serves as an accessible introduction to plague literature and to the arena in which it has evolved since ancient times. To undergraduate and graduate students, Bills of Mortality affords an opportunity for scholarly engagement in a topic no less timely now than it was when plague struck Milan in 1629 or ravaged Venice in 1912 or felled Thebes in antiquity.