English Language and Literature Commons^™

Play For Mortal Stakes: Funerals As Modernist Acts Of Fiction, Janine Marie Utell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the ritualization of death in British literature of the interwar period and its implication for narrative and genre. The authors under consideration include poets of the Great War (Robert Graves, Charles Sorley, Isaac Rosenberg, the Sitwells), and later writers such as Katherine Mansfield, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden, Ivy Compton-Bumett, and James Joyce. Using the methodology of ritual studies, an interdisciplinary approach combining the perspectives of religion, anthropology, and literary criticism, I examine how these texts create a fictive space in which death can be ritualized and how this process …