Inventing Afterlives

Regina M. Janes proposes a new theory of the origins of the hereafter. Drawing on a variety of religious traditions and contemporary literature and film as well as cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, Inventing Afterlives shows that in asking what happens after we die we define the worlds we inhabit and the values by which we live.

Regina M. Janes is professor of English at Skidmore College. Her books include Gabriel García Márquez: Revolutions in Wonderland (1981); One Hundred Years of Solitude: Modes of Reading (1991); and Losing Our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture (2005).

Daniel T. O'Hara, Temple University:
Regina Janes’ Inventing Afterlives is a breezy but well-informed romp through the ages as cultures from those of primitive humans to those of the digital age do what the title of this manuscript states, invent afterlives, telling their members what to expect, or, as in our own age, telling them what cannot happen even if the space or site of the afterlife gives writers a perfect setting to stage righteous justice or cynical evasion.

Blakey Vermeule, Stanford University:
Inventing Afterlives is an intensively researched and brilliant book. The question of what humans have made of the afterlife is fascinating and Janes, who knows more about this subject than any scholar living (or, dare I say it, dead), has achieved something like completeness in her survey of the material.

David Bromwich, Yale University:
Regina Janes has written a brilliant, inquisitive, polymath essay to explain why the afterlife required inventing and what the results may show about the diversity and consistency of human nature. For adventurous wit on a forbidding terrain, this book has no precedent and will allow no imitator.

Paula R. Backscheider, Philpott Stevens Eminent Scholar, Auburn University:
This engaging and thought-provoking book has a capacious range that includes those who believe there is no afterlife and spans time from the ancient Greeks and Egyptians to our current scientific, psychological, and religious thinking about what we imagine—or hope—happens after death.