For Lisa Perdigao, the dead body in literature matters. As “the figure at the utter limit of representation” (1), its explicit materiality unsettles attempts to inscribe and narrate it through discourse. Indeed, the routine degendering of the dead body, in its passing from “he” or “she” to “it,” speaks to the stripping of identity, individuality and agency that the site (and sight) of the corpse instills.

In this rich and carefully argued book, Perdigao explores how twentieth-century American authors responded to the challenge of “encrypting the body” (1). Developing existing scholarship on representations of death (particularly Elizabeth Bronfen's work), Perdigao critically locates her study alongside literary discussions concerning the “body-as-text” metaphor and Peter Brooks's “masterplot” thesis of narratological drive (where narrative works towards a totalizing metaphor). Both, in their differing theoretical ways, posit the body as subsumable to discourse. For Perdigao, however, the dead body in literature is significant precisely because it perpetually negotiates “the tension between the materiality of the body and the discursivity of language” (8). This tension materializes because the presence of the corpse triggers a crisis of representation, instigating a wish to conceal and forget, alongside a desire to reveal and remember. The narrative oscillation between the two, their formal rendering, and the wider significance of such, form the central focus of Perdigao's study.

Perdigao is especially concerned with shifts between modern and postmodern figurations. In modern texts, including Cather's The Professor's House and Wright's Native Son, she finds a tendency towards burial, both literal and figurative. This is read as an “attempt to repress the sight of the dirty death” (17) – the visceral corporeality that, in modernity, increasingly punctured the Victorian aestheticization of death. For example, Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby is shown to achieve narrative closure through transforming the horrific materiality of Myrtle's dead body into a metaphor for the new world. Within these texts, however, Perdigao observes a “growing distrust of language and concealment” (72). This is argued most strikingly through Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, where Addie, speaking from within her own coffin, challenges the objectifying stranglehold of language by insisting upon the tangible matter and subjectivity of self.

Turning to postmodern works, from Morrison's Beloved to Shields's The Fig Eater, Perdigao identifies a predilection for exhumation in response to the increasingly apparent inadequacies of entombment. This turn to excavation, however, does not solve the problem of the dead body. Instead it presents new complications, threatening the cohesion of narrative and introducing the “politics of recovery” (156). Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides and Butler's Kindred, for example, are read as wrestling with the question of “who has authority over the representation of the corpse” (103). Perdigao's close readings in these chapters are compelling, benefiting from her earlier groundwork and an increasing engagement with questions of gender, race and historiography. In her final chapter, Perdigao explores Alice Walker's “exhumation” of Zora Neale Hurston and her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, following their historical burial within the corpus of American literature. Her discussion here impressively elucidates and consolidates the analysis developed across her study, accentuating the political import that had occasionally been occluded through theory.

Given Perdigao's interest in mapping historical shifts, there is often a frustrating absence of sociocultural context and American specificity. Equally, a greater range of texts could have strengthened her broader arguments, particularly as many of her modern examples problematize, rather than present, the burial plot she argues is central to that period. These caveats aside, Perdigao's book is a welcome addition to the study of death and an important contribution to scholarship on narrative and the body.