Reanimating Grief - by William McEvoy (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book explores how literature, theatre and music revive the dead to explore the dynamics of grief and mourning. Combining expressive and analytical writing, it offers a critical poetics of loss to show how ghosts, scenes of mourning, memories of reading or viewing, and acoustic fragments, all reanimate the dead in different ways.

Book Synopsis

Reanimating grief is a wide-ranging study of the poetics of bereavement in theatre, literature and song. It examines the way cultural works reanimate the dead in the form of ghosts, memories or scenes of mourning, and uses critical and creative writing to express grief's subjectivity and uniqueness. It covers classic texts from Greek tragedy and Shakespeare to works by Anton Chekhov, Samuel Beckett, Enda Walsh, Sally Rooney and Maggie O'Farrell. The book argues that the return of the dead in theatre and fiction is an act of memorial and an expression of love that illustrates the relationship between art, enchantment and impossibility.

From the Back Cover

Reanimating grief explores the revival of the dead in literature, theatre and performance. Using the central concept of 'reanimation', the book captures the multiple ways the dead return in cultural texts as ghosts or memories, epiphanies or fragments, in visual, textual or acoustic forms.

The chapters combine critical and creative writing to show how bereavement involves a desire to understand death's poetics and to express the uniqueness of personal loss. The book covers a wide range of works from classic literature to contemporary theatre, performance and fiction, and opens up new avenues for writing about grief, its artistics representation, and personal loss. Reanimating grief suggests that reanimations are impossible acts of revival, elegies for loss and belated expressions of love.

About the Author

William McEvoy is Associate Professor of Drama and English at the University of Sussex