Dead Women Talking: Figures of Injustice in American Literature - Hardcover

Norman, Brian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1421407523 ISBN 13: 9781421407524

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012

Synopsis

Dead women speak as agents of social justice in work by some of the best-known writers of American literature.

Brian Norman uncovers a curious phenomenon in American literature: dead women who nonetheless talk. These characters appear in works by such classic American writers as Poe, Dickinson, and Faulkner as well as in more recent works by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Tony Kushner, and others. These figures are also emerging in contemporary culture, from the film and best-selling novel The Lovely Bones to the hit television drama Desperate Housewives.

Dead Women Talking demonstrates that the dead, especially women, have been speaking out in American literature since well before it was fashionable. Norman argues that they voice concerns that a community may wish to consign to the past, raising questions about gender, violence, sexuality, class, racial injustice, and national identity. When these women insert themselves into the story, they do not enter precisely as ghosts but rather as something potentially more disrupting: posthumous citizens. The community must ask itself whether it can or should recognize such a character as one of its own. The prospect of posthumous citizenship bears important implications for debates over the legal rights of the dead, social histories of burial customs and famous cadavers, and the political theory of citizenship and social death.

About this title

About the Author

Brian Norman is Dean of the Gwen Ifill College of Arts, Media, and Humanities at Simmons University in Boston. He is also author of Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature and The American Protest Essay and National Belonging.

From the Back Cover

Brian Norman uncovers a curious phenomenon in American literature: dead women who nonetheless talk. These characters appear in works by such classic American writers as Poe, Dickinson, and Faulkner as well as in more recent works by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Tony Kushner, and others. These figures are also emerging in contemporary culture, from the film and best-selling novel The Lovely Bones to the hit television drama Desperate Housewives.

Dead Women Talking demonstrates that the dead, especially women, have been speaking out in American literature since well before it was fashionable. Norman argues that they voice concerns that a community may wish to consign to the past, raising questions about gender, violence, sexuality, class, racial injustice, and national identity. When these women insert themselves into the story, they do not enter precisely as ghosts but rather as something potentially more disrupting: posthumous citizens. The community must ask itself whether it can or should recognize such a character as one of its own. The prospect of posthumous citizenship bears important implications for debates over the legal rights of the dead, social histories of burial customs and famous cadavers, and the political theory of citizenship and social death.

"Insightful and powerfully affecting, Dead Women Talking deepens our understanding of how the dead remain a vital presence and social force in American life and literature."―Women's Studies

"Norman examines an original, intriguing phenomenon in American literature―stories with deceased female characters . . . The study is well researched and offers an array of critical approaches. This important contribution to the study of American fiction should endure for some time."―Choice

"Dead women have been speaking out in literature for a long time. What Norman does with this book is to bring our attention to them as a group so that we might bring the concerns of these women to the forefront of our discussions."―Rocky Mountain Review

From the Inside Flap

Brian Norman uncovers a curious phenomenon in American literature: dead women who nonetheless talk. These characters appear in works by such classic American writers as Poe, Dickinson, and Faulkner as well as in more recent works by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Tony Kushner, and others. These figures are also emerging in contemporary culture, from the film and best-selling novel The Lovely Bones to the hit television drama Desperate Housewives.

Dead Women Talking demonstrates that the dead, especially women, have been speaking out in American literature since well before it was fashionable. Norman argues that they voice concerns that a community may wish to consign to the past, raising questions about gender, violence, sexuality, class, racial injustice, and national identity. When these women insert themselves into the story, they do not enter precisely as ghosts but rather as something potentially more disrupting: posthumous citizens. The community must ask itself whether it can or should recognize such a character as one of its own. The prospect of posthumous citizenship bears important implications for debates over the legal rights of the dead, social histories of burial customs and famous cadavers, and the political theory of citizenship and social death.

Insightful and powerfully affecting, Dead Women Talking deepens our understanding of how the dead remain a vital presence and social force in American life and literature.--Women's Studies

Norman examines an original, intriguing phenomenon in American literature--stories with deceased female characters . . . The study is well researched and offers an array of critical approaches. This important contribution to the study of American fiction should endure for some time.--Choice

Dead women have been speaking out in literature for a long time. What Norman does with this book is to bring our attention to them as a group so that we might bring the concerns of these women to the forefront of our discussions.--Rocky Mountain Review

--Leonard Cassuto, author of Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories "Rocky Mountain Review"

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

These dead women, at least the more literary ones, constitute a tradition in which writers address pressing social issues that refuse to stay dead. When they talk, they speak not only to their own lives, but also to matters of justice, history, and dearly held national ideals―whether the community welcomes it or not. Thus, writers stage encounters with that which should be past but has not passed. For instance, an American narrator encounters atrophied lines of aristocratic privilege in Poe’s 1839 tale “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Or, in Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, a mother confronts slavery’s legacy a generation after its demise. And in Kushner’s Angels in America, Ethel Rosenberg sits at the deathbed of Roy Cohn in Reagan-era America, taunting the man who orchestrated her notorious McCarthy-era execution.
―From the Introduction

Edition details

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1421407523
• ISBN 13: 9781421407524
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240