This essay explores the nature and significance of the intersection of surrealist automatism and autobiography in the surrealist novel through an analysis of Aurora (1927–8; pub. 1946), by Michel Leiris, as compared with other surrealist novels such as Louis Aragon’s Anicet, or the Panorama (1921). Hoping to recover from a major emotional crisis, Leiris embarked upon a five-month trip to Egypt and Greece in 1927. Commenced during this journey, Aurora combines surrealist approaches with fictional and documentary elements in an investigation of the limits and fluid expanses of the writing self. How does automatism at once reinforce and obliterate the autobiographical source? In Aurora, surrealist automatism and elements of autobiography become epistemological demonstrations, via the words of the writer who is writing in real time, of the sheer fact of being alive and the possibility of impending death. Therefore, Aurora also experiments with thanatography, which is a written account of the death of the self. One way of understanding Aurora, Leiris asserts, is as a surrealist magnum opus, or account of the alchemical striving towards the creation of the philosopher’s stone recast as the surrealist path to greater awareness of a fundamentally unknowable, unbounded, and unstable self.

This chapter examines Nature's ultimatum at On the Nature of Things 3.931-962 as a contribution to the much-discussed problem of “deprivation”. This is the problem that death may be bad after all, despite the elimination of sensation, because it deprives us of the opportunity to complete projects that are worthwhile. As I try to show, Lucretius personifies Nature in order to have her argue, in her own words, for a message that Lucretius develops throughout his entire poem: this is the necessity of accepting the natural conditions of our existence. Nature underscores this necessity with the harshness of her words. At the same time, she shows that the conditions themselves are not harsh. Instead, she has provided us with ample opportunity to achieve happiness within a finite lifetime. In sum, she does not deprive us; for she has made it possible for us to flourish fully within the limits she has placed on us.

By attending to a common theatrical convention – the representation of both dead and apparently dead bodies by actors – Chapter 1 offers a new history of early modern English tragicomedy. In all theatrical performance, the actor’s body is semiotically volatile, for its liveliness can never be entirely circumscribed by the onstage fiction. This chapter demonstrates that the early modern theater frequently exacerbated that necessary instability by requiring its actors to feign death. Tracking instances of apparent death from the late 1580s through the opening of the seventeenth century, the chapter shows that theater practitioners increasingly invited their spectators to apprehend the ambiguity of the lively stage corpse, entwining them in uncertainty by offering them less and less interpretive guidance about the actor’s inevitable signs of life. Audiences gradually came to expect that they could not know the fictional status of apparent corpses. The conventions that eventually coalesced around stage corpses enabled the rise of English tragicomedy, the hybrid genre that allowed for seemingly dead bodies to resurrect themselves without warning.

This chapter completes the story of Giorgio Amendola (and his wife Germaine) and his communist brothers: the independent Antonio (who died young in 1953) and the orthodox Pietro. After an account of Giorgio as a fighting partisan, or an organiser of fighting partisans, we move on to his history in the renamed Italian Communist Party after 1945. We examine his role in the establishment of the Italian Republic in 1946–7 and the concentration Togliatti then expected from him on the South. The PCI’s slow detachment from Stalinism is also reviewed. Until his death, Giorgio could never bring himself to prefer American civilisation to Soviet. Nonetheless, he actively favoured the PCI policy of a national ‘Italian road to socialism’. The automatic succession of Luigi Longo to party leadership in 1964 dashed Giorgio’s hopes in that regard. By the 1970s, he had become a (massive) party elder, with time to write his deeply humane memoirs. He died on 5 June 1980, Germaine following him to the grave within hours; she had become a well-regarded painter and the two were always thought to be engaged in their deeply romantic love story. They were given public and family burial in the Campo Verano.

This chapter argues that, just as the opening of the dialogue repeatedly alluded forward to the theories Socrates goes on to develop, Socrates’ death scene repeatedly refers back to these theories. It does so by showing Socrates living in accordance with the views he has defended over the course of the dialogue about the soul, courage, temperance, how to act toward the gods, and the correct way to interpret them. Scholarship on the death scene, especially in the last thirty years, has been dominated by Socrates’ famous last words: “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. All of you must pay what is owed and not be careless” (118a7–8). Given its obscurity and the temptation to project our own desired message back onto these words, it is especially important to place them within their context in the death scene and the dialogue as a whole. My procedure is first to set up constraints within which an interpretation should operate, and then suggest a series of interrelated possibilities that fit within these constraints. Doing so provides the opportunity to review some of the dialogue’s major ideas.

Chapter 3 continues the account of the contest between Mussolini and his unapologetically violent new movement and Amendola’s efforts to reform and defend liberal democracy. As a patriot and a liberal, Giovanni was as staunchly anti-Marxist as the sometime Marxist Mussolini had become. But with his armed squads and populist newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, Mussolini’s political recipe was more successful than Giovanni’s purism and rigour. By 1924, Amendola was the leader of the Aventine Secession, a rump of parliamentarians who withdrew from the Chamber of Deputies when Mussolini’s aides murdered their moderate socialist colleague, Matteotti. Amendola maintained his Anti-Fascist leadership until he was assaulted by Fascists in Tuscany in July 1925. After a retreat to Paris and two unsuccessful emergency operations, he died in Cannes in April 1926. While Giovanni was heavily engaged in politics, he continued to wrestle with his relationship with his wife, Eva Kühn, and their four children. Eva went in and out of mental institutions, whether fairly or not. At some point in these years, Giovanni entered into a relationship with the independent Bulgarian-French journalist Nelia Pavlova.

This chapter considers the network of poets orientated around the Georgian Poetry publications that appeared in a series from 1912 to 1922, edited by the influential literary and artistic champion Edward Marsh. It discusses the innovations advanced by contributing writers even as they consciously adhered to a lyric inheritance that stressed continuity over rupture. With some exceptions, it argues that these poets relied on a pastoral palate to articulate complex emotional and sensical realities while they contended – implicitly and, more rarely, explicitly – with the jarring physical and psychological assaults of the First World War. Finally, it addresses the ways in which the editors and established contributors used the publication as a platform to promote emerging and important literary voices, including the likes of Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg.

This chapter examines Tolstoy’s treatment of mortality – from his earliest published works to his last, and in letters, diaries, and conversations – as a long preparation for his own death. It draws especially from his later period, when he drew nearer to death and became increasingly focused on it, often reminding those around him, and his reading public, of their need to do the same. Thus, while Tolstoy anticipated death as a personal sacrament, he also created a context for the public to consider his passing as a collective examination of his values. The chapter concludes with Tolstoy’s death at Astapovo railway station in 1910, where he attempted to meet his own expectations for this moment within the spectacle created by a public bent on treating it as its own rite of passage.

In this final chapter, I analyze Furūgh Farrukhzād’s innovative development of Nīmā’s earlier prosodic experiments and link Farrukhzād’s late modernist poetic project with Western modernist poetry. My purpose in avoiding lengthy comparisons with Western poetry up to this point in the book is to provincialize European poetic modernism and consider instead the significant links in poetic forms, themes, and politics that were more important for the elaboration of modernism in the Arab and Iranian contexts. However, I also readily admit that Western poetic influence plays a significant role in the Arab and Iranian modernists’ approaches to poetry. I thus take the opportunity in this last chapter to address Farrukhzād’s work not only in the context of local poetic connections, but also in light of the bonds she forged with Western modernist poetry. In so doing, I argue that Farrukhzād’s poetic persona is best understood as a flâneuse, the female Iranian counterpart to Charles Baudelaire’s Parisian poetic persona. I furthermore undertake a lengthy analysis of the close associations between Farrukhzād’s late poetry and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men,” from 1925.

Chapter 4 shows how Pseudo-Hegesippus participates in the common ancient Mediterranean historiographical discourse of national decline. In De Excidio 5.2, the author juxtaposes five biblical figures (Moses, Aaron, David, Joshua, Elisha) of the Hebrew past to the first-century Jews of his narrative in a way that exposes the relative lack of virtue, faith, and strength among the “latter-day Jews.”

Providing an overview of health, medicine and medical practitioners in France at the time of Molière, this chapter shows that, unsurprisingly, medical treatment and access to trained practitioners depended on social status and geographical location, although life expectancy for adults was not as uneven as we might expect. While humoral medicine continued to dominate, key advances were accepted over time, and the publication of medical works in the vernacular disseminated knowledge among literate lay persons. The challenge is to recognise what Molière’s audiences would have found credible or risible. His depiction of illness and medicine belongs to the traditions of farce, comedy-ballet and extravagant entertainments, and should not be read as a reflection on his own health or treatment by doctors. Two farces (Le Médecin volant, Le Médecin malgré lui) and a farcical scene in Dom Juan derive broad humour from a character grotesquely impersonating a physician. In contrast, three comedy-ballets (L’Amour médecin, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, Le Malade imaginaire) feature genuine physicians treating patients whom they seek to exploit for financial gain if they are delusional and gullible. Yet music, dance and entertainment are also artfully contrived to restore health, at least in the world of the theatre.