ABSTRACT
Posthumous narrative, – that is, a narrative performed “from beyond the grave” by one or several dead characters – has become an established subgenre of the current literary scene, whether in high or low culture. Several scholarly studies have been devoted to it, and its popularity is illustrated by the 67-page entry for “Fiction by a dead person” in Wikipedia, as well as by the presence of such categories as “Dead Narrators” and “Narrated by the Dead” on the “Goodreads” and “Crime Fiction Lover” Internet sites. Posthumous narrative, moreover, disrupts the canons of verisimilitude in “natural” storytelling; in texts that claim to be realistic, the dead neither speak, nor are staged as characters. Whether they take the form of the murder or the ghost story, the plots adopted in posthumous narrative must be distinguished from those analyzed by Rachel Falconer in her study of the representations of Hell in contemporary literature.
