In what I hope will be a satisfying sequel to my previous last post, I am thrilled to announce the publication of my book Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2020).
If you are (understandably) hesitant to pay the exorbitant $119.99 listed on Amazon or 85,59 € on Palgrave's website, I am pleased to make the Punk Rock move of posting the entire book here as a free PDF.
(This is all Open Access and legal and above board, if you're worried about that sort of thing; the PDF is just kinda buried on Palgrave's website, so I wanted to make it more publicly accessible).
From the back cover:
‘Jacob L. Bender’s Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature is a remarkable exploration of the spectral in the broad Atlantic world. His argument moves beyond boundaries of land and sea to reveal the nuanced union of Irish, Caribbean, and Latin American peoples and cultures. Bender’s unique focus shows just what an intimate part of the writing life death is for artists like Joyce, Borges, Carpentier, and Beckett.’
― Maria McGarrity, Long Island University, USA, and author of Washed by the Gulf Stream: The Historic and Geographic Relation of Irish and Caribbean Literature (2008)
‘Modern
Death in Irish and Latin American Literature examines an array of
texts from different countries including Puerto Rico, Mexico, Colombia
and Argentina, comparing them with key works from the Irish literary
tradition. This transatlantic focus makes for an engrossing study and
the readings of the texts are persuasive and compelling. Bender’s study
teases out the rich complexities of Irish and Latin American shared
conceptualisations of death and illuminates the ways in which symbolic
representations of the dead can act as mechanisms through
which hegemonic discourses are disrupted, and erased voices may come to
the fore. It promises to be a lasting contribution to scholarship on all
of the individual authors featured while prompting additional
comparative readings of literary conceptualizations of death in these
and other contexts.’
― Nuala Finnegan, University College Cork, Ireland, and Society for Irish Latin American Studies (SILAS)
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 letters―where they are largely either monstrous horrors
or illusory frauds―the dead in these Irish/Latinx archives can serve as
potential allies, repositories of historical grievances, recorders of
silenced voices, and disruptors of neocolonial discourse.
_______________________________
Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Introduction (pp. 1-15)
Chapter 2. The Mexican Day of the Dead and Celtic Halloween on the Borderlands (pp. 17-43)
Chapter 3. Graveyard Communities: The Speech of the Dead in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille. (pp. 45-75)
Chapter 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 (pp. 77-96)
Chapter 5. "Upon All the Living and The Dead": James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, and Their Infinite Ghosts (pp. 97-126)
Chapter 6. Interlude: "There'll Be Scary Ghost Stories"—English Ghosts of Christmas Past (pp. 127-138)
Chapter 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 (pp. 139-172)
Chapter 8. Under My Vodou: Haiti, Revolution, and Zombie Transformation as Liberation in Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World and Brian Moore’s No Other Life (pp. 173-204)
Chapter 9. A Terrible Beauty Is Born: William Butler Yeats, Julia de Burgos, and Romantic Resurrection (pp. 205-232)
Chapter 10. Revenants of the Dispossessed: A Momentary Conclusion (pp. 233-236)
(Book PDF and other publications also available on my Academia.edu profile.)
