Afterword: Conjuring the Literary Dead - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1587299895 ISBN 13: 9781587299896

Publisher: University of Iowa Press, 2011

Synopsis

If you could meet one deceased literary figure, who would that be? What would you ask? What would you say, and why? In AfterWord: Conjuring the Literary Dead, eighteen distinguished authors respond to this challenge by creating imagined conversations with a constellation of British and American authors, from Samuel Johnson to Jane Austen to Samuel Beckett to Edith Wharton. Each chapter embarks on an intellectual, emotional, and often humorous voyage as the layers of time are peeled away, letting readers experience authors as they really were in their own era or, on occasion, transported to the present. As eccentric as it is eclectic, this collection takes the audience on a dizzying descent into a literary Inferno where biographers, novelists, and critics eat the food of the dead and return to tell the tale. Readers will take great pleasure in seeing what happens when scholars are loosed from the chains of fact and conduct imaginary interviews with deceased authors. Covering 200 years of literary history, the essays in AfterWord draw upon the lifelong, consuming interest of the contributors, each fashioning a vivid, credible portrait of a vulnerable, driven, fully human character. As contributors appeal to what Margaret Atwood calls the deep human desire to “go to the land of the dead, to bring back to the living someone who has gone there,” readers are privy to questions that have seldom been asked, to incidents that have been suppressed, to some of the secrets that have puzzled readers for years, and to novel literary truths about the essential nature of each author.

About this title

Product Description:

Rare Book

Review:

"Leavening its gothic logos with a bit of fanciful mythos, this eccentric and compelling volume provides rich and often surprising reading. What else could one ask of a book that seeks congress with corpses?"--Sean Latham, author, "The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law and the Roman a Clef"

Leavening its gothic logos with a bit of fanciful mythos, this eccentric and compelling volume provides rich and often surprising reading. What else could one ask of a book that seeks congress with corpses? Sean Latham, author, "The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law and the Roman a Clef"

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About this edition

• Publisher: University of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1587299895
• ISBN 13: 9781587299896
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240
• Editor: Dale Salwak