Whether as a theme, scene, or sentence, the representation of death provides a unique critical leverage on the workings of the post-Romantic novel, as Garett Stewart demonstrates in this study of over forty major texts. Through close stylistic analysis Stewart examines death as a pivotal moment for language on the edge of silence, for narrative on the brink of closure. Chapters ranging from Dickens and other Victorian novelists through Joseph Conrad and E. M. Forster to D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf offer revisionist readings of exemplary texts. The study concludes with discussion of the postmodernist treatment of death in the novels of Beckett and Nabokov. In the course of these discerning readings, informed by theoretical work from Freud to Walter Benjamin, Marurice Blanchot, and Roland Barthes, Stewart demonstrates that the Victorian death scene is less sentimental and formulaic than has usually been assumed; he thus argues for a fertile continuity from the nineteenth-century novel to its twentieth-century experimental progeny.

With his most unusual gift for subtle stylistic interpretation, Garrett Stewart is more or less sui generis, belonging to no particular school of criticism... This distinguished book’s central insight about death scenes is original and a brilliant one, and it is worked out in detail in a series of admirable close-readings of major scenes, reading of extreme finesse and sensitivity.
-- J. Hillis Miller