Dorothy Kelly to Publish Book
Prof. of French Dorothy Kelly has a new book forthcoming in 2021, titled The Living Death of Modernity: Balzac, Baudelaire, Zola, to be published by Legenda press.
Prof. Kelly describes her work as follows:
Living-dead characters appear surprisingly often in the realist works of Balzac and Zola, and in the modern poetry of Baudelaire. In this era of industrialization and modernization, images of the living dead disrupt this state of the new and make visible the impossibility of erasing the past. A skeleton that communicates with a character during a shopping trip, a body taken over by a past ancestor, a ghost that haunts through the floorboards, or a more symbolic dead heart — living death takes many shapes. Readings of these authors chart the various ways that the image of living death permeates their works and the meanings that it generates.