Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature examines an array of texts from different countries including Puerto Rico, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina comparing them with key works from the Irish literary tradition. This trans-atlantic focus makes for an engrossing study and the readings of the texts are persuasive and compelling. Bender's study teases out the rich complexities of Irish and Latin American shared conceptualisations of death and illuminates the ways in which symbolic representations of the dead can act as mechanisms through which hegemonic discourses are disrupted, and erased voices may come to the fore. It promises to be a lasting contribution to scholarship on all of the individual authors featured while prompting additional comparative readings of literary conceptualizations of death in these and other contexts. -Nuala Finnegan, University College Cork, Ireland, and Society for Irish Latin American Studies (SILAS) Jacob Bender's Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature is a remarkable exploration of the spectral in the broad Atlantic world. His argument moves beyond boundaries of land and sea to reveal the nuanced union of Irish, Caribbean, and Latin American peoples and cultures. Bender's unique focus shows just what an intimate part of the writing life death is for artists like Joyce, Borges, Carpentier, and Beckett. -Maria McGarrity, Long Island University, USA, and author of Washed by the Gulf Stream: The Historic and Geographic Relation of Irish and Caribbean Literature (2008) This book explores how the nations of Ireland and Latin America have, both in parallel and in concert, deployed symbolic representations of the dead in their various anti-colonial literatures.

In contrast to the ghosts and revenants that haunt English and Anglo-American letters--where the dead are largely classified as either monstrous horrors or illusory frauds--the dead in these Irish/Latin archives can serve as potential allies, repositories of historical grievances, recorders of silenced voices, and disruptors of neocolonial discourse. Using the Day of the Dead and Halloween as departure points, this comparative study delves deep into the literary canons of both regions: from Juan Rulfo and Maírtín Ó Cadhain, to Samuel Beckett and Carlos Fuentes, James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges, Jonathan Swift and Gabriel García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier and Brian Moore, William Butler Yeats and Julia de Burgos--freshly illuminating some of their most widely discussed works.