«From Freud and psychoanalysis to Derrida and philosophy, the question of mourning has been central to a whole strain of modern thought, especially in France. This fascinating and illuminating collection of essays explores the question in a wide range of intellectual and literary settings, from the French Revolution down through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is a tour de force.» (Christopher Prendergast FBA, King’s College, Cambridge) «This volume compellingly explores the intersection of ethics and aesthetics, showing how literature can enrich our sense of the complexity of mourning, grief and loss. It provides a significant contribution to scholarship on mourning, understood as a never-ending process of relationality.» (Hanna Meretoja, University of Turku, Finland) How does modern writing in French grapple with the present absence and absent presence of lost loved ones? How might it challenge and critique the relegation of certain deaths to the realm of the unmournable? What might this reveal about the role of the literary in the French and francophone world and shifting conceptions of the nation-state? Essays on texts from the Revolution to the present day explore these questions from a variety of perspectives, bringing out the ways in which mourning contests the boundaries between the personal and the historical, the aesthetic and the ethical, the self and the other, and ultimately reasserting its truly critical resonance.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Dominique Rabaté: Préface – Dominique Rabaté: Translation by Stephen Romer: Preface – Carole Bourne-Taylor: Introduction – Unmournable Revolutions – Benjamin Thurston: Impossible Mourning: Funeral Orations for Louis XVI (1814– 1815) – Rachel Benoît: Unmourned Histories in Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale – Inconsolable (Af)filiations – Jennifer Rushworth: The Rhythm of Mourning in Proust (with Barthes and Derrida) – Henriette Korthals Altes: Mourning Their Mothers: Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and the Gift of Tears – Khalid Lyamlahy: With Barthes and Derrida in «the Margins of a Funereal Song»: The Poetics of Maternal Mourning in the Work of Abdelkébir Khatibi – Sara- Louise Cooper: Mourning the Mother, Mourning the World: Patrick Chamoiseau’s La Matière de l’absence – Poéthique: Between New Elegy and Anti-Elegy – Ariane Mildenberg: «The Door Pushed Back the Light»: On a Phenomenology of Mourning in Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Roubaud – Daisy Sainsbury: The Ends and Beginnings of Language in Valérie Rouzeau’s Pas revoir – Carole Bourne-Taylor: Poethic Justice: Re-incarnations in Emmanuel Merle’s Poetry – Sara- Louise Cooper: Conclusion: Mourning in Motion from Ireland to the Caribbean.