Introduction

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Necrofiction is defined and situated in relation to other contemporary literary forms such as trauma writing (Caruth), filiation narratives and field or documentary literature (Viart), biofiction and restaurative fiction (Gefen), historical inquiry (Jablonka), and authotanatography (Weinmann). Drawing on Pierre Nora’s work on realms of memory, François Hartog’s examination of presentism, and, more importantly, Achille Mbembe’s theorization of necropolitics, the introduction lays the conceptual and contextual framework for understanding the singularity of writing on death and the dead as a defining feature of the ethos of contemporary fiction. Writers use this genre as a form of literary action through a polemical and creative dialogue with other forms memorialization such as family genealogy, historical writing, and official national, ethnic, or religious discourses. Necrofiction often challenges the social, cultural, and political assertions of these non-literary forms in the name of a personal, intimate, lived engagement with death, the dead, and their legacy. Necrofiction seeks to instil meaning into the symbolic body of the dead but, in so doing, is always on the verge of erasing their radical difference and taming their alterity. This contemporary form allows writers to reclaim a representational regime of fiction that can recover from the semiotic and ethical paralysis of trauma writing while also testing literature’s ability to account for the lived experience of death.