In a Strange Room by David Sherman

In a Strange Room by David Sherman

Taking its title from Faulkner's epochal modernist novel, David Sherman's study traces the myriad ways death and its effect on the living defined modernist fiction and verse in England, Ireland, and the U.S. A focus on the disturbing but recurring image of the corpse allows Sherman to consider a range of texts marked by their sense of mortal fragility. Wilfred Owen's war poetry and Virginia Woolf's early novel Jacob's Room illustrate an incipient anxiety over new governmental techniques for efficiently managing the burial of the dead during World War I. Joyce's Ulysses and As I Lay Dying offer opportunities to consider narratives organized by the problem of an unburied corpse. Eliot's The Waste Land and Djuna Barnes's novel Nightwood, which Eliot edited, demonstrate how modernist writers often respond to death and the loss of corporality with erotic encounters at the moment mortality is most threatened. Two poems by William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, in the monograph's concluding section, provide emblems for competing attitudes toward the disposal of the dead in the first half of the twentieth century. Enriched by insights from psychology, anthropology, and philosophy, In a Strange Room presents a richly textured transatlantic study of a defining aspect of modernist literature and culture.

an engaging study of the ways in which society's shifting relationship with death influenced the work of a wide range of writers* J. W. Moffett, Choice *

David Sherman is Assistant Professor of English at Brandeis University.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780199333882
ISBN 10	0199333882
Title	In a Strange Room
Author	David Sherman
Series	Modernist Literature And Culture
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Oxford University Press Inc
Year published	2014-05-15
Number of pages	288
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.