We like vitality in culture. We praise the optimists among us. We extoll the virtues of a lively, rich social network. But we also, perhaps secretly cultivate the other side, fraught with
darkness, melancholia, illness, and death. Here, in eight essays, contributors examine transnational melancholy, narratives of illness, and the aesthetics of death in cultural artifacts from
literature to film. Topics include transnational affect (including the sense of loss before the sense of gain), transnational trauma in Edwidge Danticat, transnationalism in American treatments
of disease, making sense of morbidity in the early American autobiography, signification of depression in Styron’s Darkness Visible, the aesthetics of death and mourning in American literature
and film, dying as in relates to alterity (the other) and appropriation, and the ＂penal colony＂ of morbid space and discourse of life. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
(booknews.com)
