From Modernist Entombment to Postmodernist Exhumation
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A01=Lisa K. Perdigao
African American Literary Tradition
american
American literary studies
Author_Lisa K. Perdigao
body
Brooks's Reading
Brooks’s Reading
Burial Plot
Category=DSBH
Category=DSK
century
Color Purple
corpse symbolism in fiction
Dead Female Body
death representation
Dora's Body
doras
Dora’s Body
eater
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
fiction
fig
Figurative Language
Hurston's Text
Hurston's Work
Hurston’s Text
Hurston’s Work
Lisbon Girls
Literary Excavation
Lurid Figures
materiality of the body
Metonymically Connected
mourning rituals
narrative
narrative theory
neo-slave
Neo-slave Narrative
Professor's House
Professor’s House
Rape Plot
Rufus's Death
Rufus’s Death
Tea Cake
Totalizing Metaphor
twentieth
Twentieth Century American
Twentieth Century American Fiction
Twentieth Century American Literature
twentieth-century literature
Virgin Suicides
Walker's Attempts
Walker's Texts
Walker’s Attempts
Walker’s Texts
Product details
- ISBN 9780754667179
- Weight: 453g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 28 May 2010
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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How fictional representations of dead bodies develop over the twentieth century is the central concern of Lisa K. Perdigao's study of American writers. Arguing that the crisis of bodily representation can be traced in the move from modernist entombment to postmodernist exhumation, Perdigao considers how works by writers from F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, and Richard Wright to Jody Shields, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Jeffrey Eugenides reflect changing attitudes about dying, death, and mourning. For example, while modernist writers direct their plots toward a transformation of the dead body by way of metaphor, postmodernist writers exhume the transformed body, reasserting its materiality. Rather than viewing these tropes in oppositional terms, Perdigao examines the implications for narrative of the authors' apparently contradictory attempts to recover meaning at the site of loss. She argues that entombment and exhumation are complementary drives that speak to the tension between the desire to bury the dead and the need to remember, indicating shifts in critical discussions about the body and about the function of aesthetics in relation to materialized violence and loss.
Lisa K. Perdigao is Associate Professor of English at the Florida Institute of Technology. She is co-editor, with Mark Pizzato, of Death in American Texts and Performances: Corpses, Ghosts, and the Reanimated Dead (Ashgate 2010), has published articles in book collections on Adrienne Rich’s poetry, Toni Morrison’s fiction and prose, Caribbean women’s writing, and children’s and adolescent literature, and has an article forthcoming in the MLA collection on teaching William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.
