Reanimating Grief

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. -- .

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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. -- .