Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature

‘Jacob L. Bender’s Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature is a remarkable exploration of the spectral in the broad Atlantic world. His argument moves beyond boundaries of land and sea to reveal the nuanced union of Irish, Caribbean, and Latin American peoples and cultures. Bender’s unique focus shows just what an intimate part of the writing life death is for artists like Joyce, Borges, Carpentier, and Beckett.’

— Maria McGarrity, Long Island University, USA, and author of Washed by the Gulf Stream: The Historic and Geographic Relation of Irish and Caribbean Literature (2008)

‘Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature examines an array of texts from different countries including Puerto Rico, Mexico, Colombia and Argentina, comparing them with key works from the Irish literary tradition. This transatlantic focus makes for an engrossing study and the readings of the texts are persuasive and compelling. Bender’s study teases out the rich complexities of Irish and Latin American shared conceptualisations of death and illuminates the ways in which symbolic representations of the dead can act as mechanisms through which hegemonic discourses are disrupted, and erased voices may come to the fore. It promises to be a lasting contribution to scholarship on all of the individual authors featured while prompting additional comparative readings of literary conceptualizations of death in these and other contexts.’

— Nuala Finnegan, University College Cork, Ireland, and Society for Irish Latin American Studies (SILAS)

This comparative literature study explores how writers from across Ireland and Latin America have, both in parallel and in concert, deployed symbolic representations of the dead in their various anti-colonial projects. In contrast to the ghosts and revenants that hauntEnglish and Anglo-American letters—where they are largely either monstrous horrors or illusory frauds—the dead in these Irish/Latinx archives can serve as potential allies, repositories of historical grievances, recorders of silenced voices, and disruptors of neocolonial discourse.