Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction

ALICE BENNETT Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature at Liverpool Hope University, UK. She taught modern literature and theory at Durham University, UK, where she also completed her PhD.

• Acknowledgements Afterlife Now Dead Endings: Making Meaning from the Afterlife Killing Time: Narrating Eternity After Effects: Purgatory, Prolepsis and the Past Tense Plotting Murder: Genre, Plot and the Dead Narrator Ghostwords: Mind-Reading and the Dead Narrator Death Writing: Deixis of Person and the Dead Narrator Here, There and Hereafter: Fictional Worlds and the Afterlife After Life Writing Appendix: Chronology of Primary Texts Notes Bibliography Index

'Bennett's unique focus on 'after life' narratives provides valuable insight into some of the possible repercussions of writing fiction in a time of 'posts' (postmodernism, posthumanism, and even posthumousism. Between these "posts," Bennett demonstrates that after-life narratives have the ability to give a voice to the dispossessed, and to create a space of discursive experimentation for perspectives that are non-Christian and non-Western. After Life is essential reading for anyone interested in what comes after the death of the author.' - Professor Marcel O'Gorman, Department of English, University of Waterloo, Canada