Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction

By: Alice Bennett

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Synopsis: Afterlife and Narrative explores why life after death is such a potent cultural concept today, and why it is such an attractive prospect for modern fiction. The book mines a rich vein of imagined afterlives, from the temporal experiments of Martin Amis's Time's Arrow to narration from heaven in Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. At the heart of the book is a focus on how the properties of the afterlife have become a tool for examining the capacities and conventions of narrative fiction. Modern novels carry the history of realism and its attempts to present life as it is, but many of the techniques which achieve these effects require perspectives and positions for narration that are profoundly un-lifelike. Each chapter of the book takes a fresh look at problems in narrative theory, taking all its cues from experimental narratives set in the afterlife, from avant-garde experimentation to popular genre fiction. Afterlife and Narrative examines, applies and refines anti-mimetic theories of fiction in readings of a group of texts which are after, but not in imitation of, life.