Response to Death: The Literary Work of Mourning

Christian Riegel
Campion College

16 February 2005

The HRI was pleased to co-sponsor, with Campion College, the launch of Response to Death: The Literary Work of Mourning (University of Alberta Press/Canadian Review of Comparative Literature), an anthology of essays edited by Christian Riegel (Assistant Professor of English, Campion College). At this event, Christian Riegel talked informally about his editorial work in assembling this volume.

Response to Death presents a literary historical perspective on mourning, tracing examples of mourning in literary works from the medieval world to the present day. Contributors offer a chronological examination of the concept of the work of mourning in specific literary and historical contexts, beginning with an exploration of the medieval York Cycle of plays and sixteenth-century French women’s lyric, and continuing through the Renaissance, with considerations of Shakespeare, the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth century.

Christian Riegel teaches Canadian literature, genre studies, and poetry at Campion College, University of Regina. He is the author of Writing Grief: Margaret Laurence and the Work of Mourning (2003), and the editor of Challenging Territory: The Writing of Margaret Laurence (1997) and A Sense of Place: Re-Evaluating Regionalism in Canadian and American Writing (1998).