Description
Book SynopsisThe 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.
Trade ReviewInsightful 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. -- Kristin Hutchins 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. -- Dana Benge Rocky Mountain Review
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Recognizing the Dead
1. Dead Woman Wailing: Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher"
2. Dead Woman Dictating: Henry James's The Turn of the Screw
3. Dead Woman Rotting: William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying
4. Dead Woman Cursing: Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens
5. Dead Woman Wanting: Toni Morrison's Beloved
6. Dead Woman Heckling: Tony Kushner's Angels in America
7. Dead Women Gossiping: Randall Kenan's Let the Dead Bury Their Dead
8. Dead Women Healing: Ana Castillo's So Far from God
9. Dead Woman Coming of Age: Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones
10. Dead Woman Singing: Suzan-Lori Parks's Getting Mother's Body
11. When Dead Women Don't Talk: Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman"
Notes
Bibliography
Index
