Dressing for the Afterlife
- Submitting institution
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De Montfort University
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 27038
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Nine Arches Press
- ISBN
- 978-1913437015
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- September
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This is an exploration of my Greek Cypriot identity, the after-effects of family diaspora, and the shifting sands of feminine gender roles. Here, the poems attempt to capture moments of transition, when identities, contexts and roles are brought into question, challenged, even changed. In ‘Dressing for the afterlife,’ the various narrated selves are trying out different clothes, experimenting with the roles and identities associated with them. Judith Butler speaks of how perceptions of gender are often ‘derived … from the clothes that the person wears, or how the clothes are worn,’ via a ‘series of cultural inferences.’ These poems often explore and deconstruct such cultural inferences, attempting to capture ‘the moment in which one’s staid and usual cultural perceptions fail.’ In that sense, the poems draw on Viktor Shklovsky’s famous concept of defamiliarization – but in new contexts: they defamiliarize ‘staid and usual cultural perceptions’ of gender, culture and diaspora. Shklovsky argues that our perception of the everyday becomes ‘habitual’ and ‘habitualisation’ itself ‘devours work, clothes, furniture.’ 'Dressing for the Afterlife', by contrast, clothes – and work and furniture – are defamiliarized, renewed, changed. The poems capture moments where the everyday, the habitual are threatened, overturned, seen in a new light, by the selves involved. That is why many of the poems include surrealist elements, flights of hypothetical fancy which attempt to re-enchant the everyday settings. In writing these poems, my style itself morphed, put on new clothes, as it were, in a way that mirrors its subject matter, often combining lyric poetry with a more fragmented, experimental or surrealist approach. 'Dressing for the Afterlife' has been highly commended for the British Forward Prizes for poetry.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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