Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature

This comparative literature study explores how writers from across Ireland and Latin America have, both in parallel and in concert, deployed symbolic representations of the dead in their various anti-colonial projects. In contrast to the ghosts and revenants that haunt English and Anglo-American letterswhere they are largely either monstrous horrors or illusory fraudsthe dead in these Irish/Latinx archives can serve as potential allies, repositories of historical grievances, recorders of silenced voices, and disruptors of neocolonial discourse.

Explores how the nations of Ireland and Latin America have deployed symbolic representations of the dead in their various anti-colonial projects throughout the 20th century Builds on growing popularity of the Mexican Day of the Dead alongside Celtic Halloween Contributes to the burgeoning fields of Latin Americanist and Irish literary criticism, comparative literature, borderland, postcolonial, and transatlantic studies, modernist studies, and even zombie studies

Autorentext

Jacob L. Bender is Professor of English at Middlesex County College, New Jersey, USA.

Inhalt

1. Introduction.- 2. The Mexican Day of the Dead and Celtic Halloween on the Borderlands.- 3. Graveyard Communities: The Speech of the Dead in Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo and Maírtín Ó Cadhain's Cré na Cille.- 4. For You Galaxies Will Burn and Stars Will Flame: The Speech of the Dying in Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies and Carlos Fuentes's The Death of Artemio Cruz.- 5. Upon All the Living and the Dead: James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, and Their Infinite Ghosts.- 6. Interlude - There'll be Scary Ghost Stories: English Ghosts of Christmas Past.- 7. The Swift and the Dead: Gulliver's Séance in W.B. Yeats's The Words Upon the Window-pane, Flann O'Brien's The Dalkey Archive, and Gabriel García Márquez's The General In His Labyrinth.- 8. Under My Vodou: Haiti and Zombie Transformation as Liberation in Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World and Brian Moore's No Other Life.- 9. A Terrible BeautyIs Born: William Butler Yeats, Julia de Burgos, and Romantic Resurrection.- 10. Revenants of the Dispossessed: A Momentary Conclusion.