From Modernist Entombment to Postmodernist Exhumation: Dead Bodies in Twentieth-Century American Fiction

How fictional representations of dead bodies develop over the twentieth century is the central concern of Lisa K. Perdigao's study of American writers. Perdigao considers works by writers from William Faulkner and Richard Wright to Toni Morrison and Jeffrey Eugenides, arguing that the crisis of bodily representation can be traced from modernist entombment to postmodernist exhumation, complementary drives that speak to the tension between the desire to bury the dead and the need to remember.