The Counter-Memorial Impulse

A wide-ranging academic study that examines the tendency in 20th-century English fiction to treat grief as an occasion for social critique, unconventional readings of works by Ford, Lessing, and Winterson demonstrate how narrative experimentation in this period responds to socio-historic conditions like post-imperial melancholy, nuclear fear and homophobia. First published 2009.

Table of Contents (previews available at Palgrave.com):

  1. Melancholia, Group Psychology, Irony: Psychoanalytic Foundations

  2. The End of Empire: Grieving, Englishness, and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier

  3. Mourning the Future: Nuclear War, Prophecy, and Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook

  4. Embodied Grief: The Elegiac Tradition and Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body

  5. Conclusion: Literature of Hope: Ethical Mourning