Response to Death presents a literary historical perspective on mourning, tracing examples of mourning in literary works from the medieval world to the present day. Contributors offer a chronological examination of the concept of the work of mourning in specific literary and historical contexts, beginning with an exploration of the medieval York Cycle of plays and sixteenth-century French women's lyric, and continuing through the Renaissance with considerations of Shakespeare, the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth century. Foreword by Jonathan Hart.

Christian Riegel teaches Canadian Literature, Genre Studies, and Poetry courses at Campion College at the University of Regina. He is the editor of Challenging Territory: The Writing of Margaret Laurence and A Sense of Place: Re-evaluating Regionalism in Canadian and American Writing, and has published interviews and articles about several Canadian writers.

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"This volume supplies some interesting essays about mourning in literature. In particular, Stephen Behrendt's contribution, 'Mourning, Myth, and Merchandising: The Public Death of Princess Charlotte,' is a magisterial study of the material culture that served as forum for, and reaction to, the death of Charlotte Augusta during childbirth in 1817.. Heather Dubrow's brief article, 'Mourning Becomes Electric: The Politics of Grief in Shakespeare's Lucrece,' is similarly incisive. Here she argues for the political valence of mourning, a valence that qualifies individual agency even as it can be generative of power and authority. This serves a sharp qualification to the familiar neo-Freudian readings of 'Lucrece,' a move that enables Dubrow to draw connections between the epic's rhetoric of mourning and the discourse of Shakespeare's other texts." Karen Weisman, University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 76, No. 1, Winter 2007

"Editor Christian Riegel has compiled a fine collection of essays on the treatment of mourning in works ranging from the York cycle of medieval plays to 16th-century French lyrics to contemporary American and Canadian poetry..The treatment of works by the Canadian poet Lola Lemire Tostevin by Thomas M. Gerry and the essay on Paul Monette's AIDS elegy are worth the price of the volume." Bert Almon, Canadian Book Review Annual, 2006.

"Scholars of literature from Canada and the US offer a cross-cultural sampling of the literary response to death and portrayal of mourning from the Middle Ages to the late 20th century. Among their examples are the York Corpus Christi Cycle, women's languages of lament in 16th-century French lyric, and using up words in Paul Monette's AIDS elegy. " Reference & Research Book News, May 2005

".excellence and breadth.accessibility and.[a] sensitivity of its authors to perennial questions of mourning and its expressions.Standouts for a wider audience are Stephen Behrendt's essay on the death of Princess Charlotte in 1817, so hauntingly reminiscent of the outpouring of grief after the death of Princess Diana, and Lloyd Edward Kermode's essay on Paul Monette. Highly recommended." Library Journal, May 2005