Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction

This is a book about terminals and boundaries, mortality and closure, the infinitesimals of style and the finite limits of representational language, about least and last things together. It is a book, to start with, about three vast and familiar facts of life and art: death, content, and form. Only by their particular triangulation in the genre of prose fiction do they mark out the hypothesis of the present study: that death in fiction is the fullest instance of form indexing content, is indeed the moment when content, comprising the imponderable of negation and vacancy, can be found dissolving to pure form. Death in narrative yields, by yielding to, sheer style.


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