Download or read book Talking to the Dead written by Nina Witoszek and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Talking to the Dead is an essay on death and its tenacious hold on Irish culture. There are few traditions in which funerary motifs have been so ubiquitous in literature, popular rituals, folk representations, public rhetorics, even constructions of place. There are even fewer cultures in which funerary genres and preoccupations constitute the central thread of continuity. The Irish Theatrum Mortis is not simply an obsession of writers from the bards to Beckett and Heaney. Nor is it confined to contemporary Republican iconography. It is to be found in the pages of the local press, in acts of ritual resistance to unpopular decisions, in the way in which significant public events are narrated and framed. Though the funerary Ireland presented here may well yield to the new, positive self-image of the Celtic Tiger, it is the authors' contention that at the end of the twentieth century the funerary sign continues to define Irish identity. For good and ill, it is the centre that holds.