This book explores how literature, theatre and music revive the dead to explore the dynamics of grief and mourning. Combining expressive and analytical writing, it offers a critical poetics of loss to show how ghosts, scenes of mourning, memories of reading or viewing, and acoustic fragments, all reanimate the dead in different ways.

Introduction1 Genealogies of grief: classic reanimations2 Animate objects of mourning3 Grief, fiction, passion4 Dead forms, living characters5 Burying the living and the dead 6 Musical afterlives 7 MothersongsConclusion. Impossible reanimationsReferencesIndex

Reanimating grief explores the revival of the dead in literature, theatre and performance. Using the central concept of ‘reanimation’, the book captures the multiple ways the dead return in cultural texts as ghosts or memories, epiphanies or fragments, in visual, textual or acoustic forms.The chapters combine critical and creative writing to show how bereavement involves a desire to understand death’s poetics and to express the uniqueness of personal loss. The book covers a wide range of works from classic literature to contemporary theatre, performance and fiction, and opens up new avenues for writing about grief, its artistics representation, and personal loss. Reanimating grief suggests that reanimations are impossible acts of revival, elegies for loss and belated expressions of love.