The uneasiness of emotion and its representations in Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (2015) a sense of crisis in a family with two young sons, brought on by the sudden death of their mother, is undisguised. What makes the novel more than a work simply about a subject as fraught as grief is its deployment of intertextual references through which Porter evokes the difficulties inherent to articulating grief and the complexity of the emotions that it encompasses. Grief Is the Thing with Feathers is a novel about the experience of grief as much as about the limitations of linguistic representation, which call to mind not only the energies of postmodern fiction but also the capaciousness of the novel form. This essay attends to the ways in which the affective force of grief is represented in Grief by looking at intertextuality as central to its expression. In other words, it is via intertextual references that the novel makes known the many forms that grief takes as it evolves. In this , the essay considers the reading experience of the active reader, particularly in terms of how the representation of emotion influences not simply a cognitive understanding of grief, but also an affective response.