This Collection seeks to understand how literature always been deeply engaged with the ever-evolving relationship humanity has with its ultimate demise.
The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature
seeks to understand the ways in which literature has engaged deeply with the ever-evolving relationship humanity has with its ultimate demise. It is the most comprehensive collection in this growing field of study and includes essays by Brian McHale, Catherine Belling, Ronald Schleifer, Helen Swift, and Ira Nadel, as well as the work of a generation of younger scholars from around the globe, who bring valuable transnational insights.
Encompassing a diverse range of mediums and genres including biography and autobiography, documentary, drama, elegy, film, the novel and graphic novel, opera, picturebooks, poetry, television, and more the contributors offer a dynamic mix of approaches that range from expansive perspectives on particular periods and genres to extended analyses of select case studies. Essays are included from every major Western period, including Classical, Middle Ages, Renaissance, and so on, right up to the contemporary.
This collection provides a telling demonstration of the myriad ways that humanity has learned to live with the inevitability of death, where live with itself might mean any number of things: from consoling, to memorializing, to rationalizing, to fending off, to evading, and, perhaps most compellingly of all, to escaping. Engagingly written and drawing on examples from around the world, this volume is indispensable to both students and scholars working in the fields of medical humanities, thanatography (death studies), life writing, Victorian studies, modernist studies, narrative, contemporary fiction, popular culture, and more.
Recenzijas
"This is a long overdue compendium that covers topics pertaining to death in literature and death and the literary arts from the classical to postmodern and everything between. I highly recommend this 'companion' for scholars at any stage of their studies and general readers whether their interests lie with a specific period, genre, or specialized topic such as medical humanities, death and sleep, trauma, the post-human, and much, much more." --Lesley D. Clement, Lakehead University-Orillia
Introduction
PART I Traversing the Ontological Divide
Introduction
The Final Frontier: Science Fictions of Death
Brian McHale
"Still I Danced": Performing Death in Fords The Broken Heart
Donovan Sherman
Death and the Margins of Theatre in Luigi Pirandello
Daniel K. Jernigan
Forbidden Mental Fruit? Dead Narrators and Characters from Medieval to
Postmodernist Narratives
Jan Alber
Literature and the Afterlife
Alice Bennett
The Novel as Heartbeat: The Dead Narrator in Mike McCormacks Solar Bones
Neil Murphy
Dead Man/and Woman Talking: Narratives from Beyond the Grave
Philippe Carrard
The View from Upstream: Authority and Projection in Fontenelles Nouveaux
dialogues des morts
Jessica Goodman
PART II Genres Introduction
Big Questions: Re-Visioning and Re-Scripting Death Narratives in Childrens
Literature
Lesley D. Clement
In the U-Bend with Moaning Myrtle: Thinking about Death in YA Literature
Karen Coats
Death and Mourning in Graphic Narrative
José Alaniz
Death and Documentaries: Heuristics for the Real in an Age of Simulation
Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter
Death and the Fanciulla
Reed Way Dasenbrock
Death, Literary Form, and Affective Comprehension: Primary Emotions and the
Neurological Basis of Genre
Ronald Schleifer
PART III Site, Space, and Spatiality
Introduction
Ecocide and the Anthropocene: Death and the Environment
Flore Coulouma
A Disney Death: Coco, Black Panther, and the Limits of the Afterlife
Stacy Thompson
Suicide in the Early Modern Elegiac Tradition
Kelly McGuire
Institutions and Elegies: Viewing the Dead in W. B. Yeats and John Wieners
Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh
Death "after Long Silence": Auditing Agambens Metaphysics of Negativity in
Yeatss Lyric
Samuel Caleb Wee
The Spatialization of Death in the Novels of Virginia Woolf
Ian Tan
"Memento Mori": memory, Death, and Posterity in Singapores Poetry
Jen Crawford
PART IV Rituals, Memorials, and Epitaphs
Introduction
Death and the Dead in Verse Funerary Epigrams of Ancient Greece
Arianna Gullo
Fictional Will
Helen Swift
Monumentalism, Death, and Genre in Shakespeare
John Tangney
Death and Gothic Romanticism: Dilating in/upon the Graveyard, Meditating
among the Tombs
Carol Margaret Davison
Death, Literature, and the Victorian Era
Jolene Zigarovich
The Aura of the Phonographic Relic: Hearing the Voices of the Dead
Angela Frattarola
Anecdotal Death: Samuel Johnsons Lives of the English Poets
Laura Davies
Biography: Life after Death
Ira Nadel
PART V Living with Death: Writing, Mourning, and Consolation
Introduction
"An immense expenditure of energy come to nothing": Philosophy, Literature,
and Death in Peter Weisss Abschied von den Eltern
Christopher Hamilton
Paradox, Death, and the Divine
Jamie Lin
Inner Seeing and Death Anxiety in Aidan Higginss Blind Mans Bluff and Other
Life Writing
Lara OMuirithe
Autothanatography and Contemporary Poetry
Ivan Callus
When Time Stops: Death and Autobiography in Contemporary Personal Narratives
Rosalķa Baena
"Grief made her insubstantial to herself": Illness, Aging, and Death in A. S.
Byatts Little Black Book of Stories
Graham Matthews
PART VI Historical Engagements
Introduction
On the Corpse of a Loved One in the Era of Brain Death: Bioethics and
Fictions
Catherine Belling
Death to the Music of Time: Reticence in Anthony Powells Mediated Narratives
of Death
Catherine Hoffmann
Death and Chinese War Television Dramas: (Re)configuring Ethical Judgments in
The Disguiser
W. Michelle Wang
Where Do the Disappeared Go? Writing the Genocide in East Timor
Kit Ying Lye
"Doubtfull Drede": Dying at the End of the Middle Ages
Walter Wadiak
Urbanization, Ambiguity, and Social Death in Charles Brockden Browns Arthur
Mervyn
Wanlin Li
42. Coda
Julian Gough
W. Michelle Wang is Assistant Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Daniel K. Jernigan is Associate Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Neil Murphy is Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
