Review on William McEvoy’s Reanimating Grief (Manchester University Press, 2024.)

Professor in Drama and English at the University of Sussex, with a distinguished career spanning teaching, research, and theatre criticism, including contributions to The Stage, TLS, and various academic journals.Reanimating Grief (2024) is his meditation on grief born out of personal experience with loss.The book investigates the concept of reanimation through case studies in theatre, literature, and Irish folk songs.While the term's meaning of revival is central to the kind of questioning the author employs, reanimation is utilized through its many cognates as well as metaphorical connotations.The analysis explores the expression of grief 's emotional and perceptual aspects while examining its influence on reading, critical thinking, and creative writing.It is a work thoughtfully crafted and structured with the reader in mind, with chapters further divided into subchapters ranging from three to ten pages, each with their respective introductions and conclusions.Reflecting on the personal experience of grief that prompted the research, the chapters begin with autobiographical reflections presented as short sections of creative writing.In the introduction, the author situates the key concepts and their interconnectedness such as reanimation, grief, mourning, death, and loss, along with a general outline relating to their application in the upcoming chapters.Chapter one titled Genealogies of Grief: Classic Reanimations "explores classic examples of reanimation in theatre and literature," serving both as a foundation for constructing the concept's genealogy and as a way to investigate theatre's tendency to blur the line between life and death (18).Through the katabases in Homer's Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid, McEvoy highlights the ontological shifts caused by the death of a parent and the difficulty of conceptualizing death for those they leave behind.The analysis continues with the reanimating and recursive qualities of grief and the power of poetic elegy in Virgil's and Ovid's versions of the Orpheus myth.Through Sophocles' Electra, the knowledge and perception of grief, along with the kind of narratives it can generate, are examined in relation to their contribution to the power of fiction and performance on stage.The chapter also alludes to Maria Crepsi's painting Noli Me Tangere and Jean-Luc Nancy's interpretation of the resurrection narrative before moving on to Shakespeare's elegies in Cymbeline and The Tempest.The focus here is on how the poetic acts of said elegies transform the body into textual beauty.In the following chapter, Animate Objects of Mourning, the author explores questions of animacy and inanimacy through "enchanting" moments of dramatic coups de théâtre, which he argues act as mnemonics of grief (43).The four examples discussed are Societas Raffaello Sanzio's Giulio Cesare (1997), Formalny Theatre's School for Fools (2001), the UK Complicite's Mnemonic (1999), and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1997).These plays contain moments in