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1st Edition

The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature

Edited By W. Michelle Wang, Daniel Jernigan, Neil Murphy Copyright 2021
    490 Pages
    by Routledge

    490 Pages
    by Routledge

    490 Pages
    by Routledge
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    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.

    Introduction

               PART I Traversing the Ontological Divide
              – Introduction

    1. The Final Frontier: Science Fictions of Death

      2. – Brian McHale

    2. "Still I Danced": Performing Death in Ford’s The Broken Heart

      3. – Donovan Sherman

    3. Death and the Margins of Theatre in Luigi Pirandello

      4. – Daniel K. Jernigan

    4. Forbidden Mental Fruit? Dead Narrators and Characters from Medieval to Postmodernist Narratives

      5. – Jan Alber

    5. Literature and the Afterlife

      6. – Alice Bennett

    6. The Novel as Heartbeat: The Dead Narrator in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones

      7. – Neil Murphy

    7. Dead Man/and Woman Talking: Narratives from Beyond the Grave

      8. – Philippe Carrard

    8. The View from Upstream: Authority and Projection in Fontenelle’s Nouveaux dialogues des morts

      9. – Jessica Goodman

      PART II Genres
      – Introduction

    9. Big Questions: Re-Visioning and Re-Scripting Death Narratives in Children’s Literature

      10. – Lesley D. Clement

    10. In the U-Bend with Moaning Myrtle: Thinking about Death in YA Literature

      11. – Karen Coats

    11. Death and Mourning in Graphic Narrative

      12. – José Alaniz

    12. Death and Documentaries: Heuristics for the Real in an Age of Simulation

      13. – Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter

    13. Death and the Fanciulla

      14. – Reed Way Dasenbrock

    14. Death, Literary Form, and Affective Comprehension: Primary Emotions and the Neurological Basis of Genre

      15. – Ronald Schleifer

      PART III Site, Space, and Spatiality
      – Introduction

    15. Ecocide and the Anthropocene: Death and the Environment

      16. – Flore Coulouma

    16. A Disney Death: Coco, Black Panther, and the Limits of the Afterlife

      17. – Stacy Thompson

    17. Suicide in the Early Modern Elegiac Tradition

      18. – Kelly McGuire

    18. Institutions and Elegies: Viewing the Dead in W. B. Yeats and John Wieners

      19. – Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh

    19. Death "after Long Silence": Auditing Agamben’s Metaphysics of Negativity in Yeats’s Lyric

      20. – Samuel Caleb Wee

    20. The Spatialization of Death in the Novels of Virginia Woolf

      21. – Ian Tan

    21. "Memento Mori": memory, Death, and Posterity in Singapore’s Poetry

      22. – Jen Crawford

      PART IV Rituals, Memorials, and Epitaphs
      – Introduction

    22. Death and the Dead in Verse Funerary Epigrams of Ancient Greece

      23. – Arianna Gullo

    23. Fictional Will

      24. – Helen Swift

    24. Monumentalism, Death, and Genre in Shakespeare

      25. – John Tangney

    25. Death and Gothic Romanticism: Dilating in/upon the Graveyard, Meditating among the Tombs

      26. – Carol Margaret Davison

    26. Death, Literature, and the Victorian Era

      27. – Jolene Zigarovich

    27. The Aura of the Phonographic Relic: Hearing the Voices of the Dead

      28. – Angela Frattarola

    28. Anecdotal Death: Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets

      29. – Laura Davies

    29. Biography: Life after Death

      30. – Ira Nadel

      PART V Living with Death: Writing, Mourning, and Consolation
      – Introduction

    30. "An immense expenditure of energy come to nothing": Philosophy, Literature, and Death in Peter Weiss’s Abschied von den Eltern

      31. – Christopher Hamilton

    31. Paradox, Death, and the Divine

      32. – Jamie Lin

       

    32. Inner Seeing and Death Anxiety in Aidan Higgins’s Blind Man’s Bluff and Other Life Writing

      33. – Lara O’Muirithe

    33. Autothanatography and Contemporary Poetry

      34. – Ivan Callus

    34. When Time Stops: Death and Autobiography in Contemporary Personal Narratives

      35. – Rosalía Baena

    35. "Grief made her insubstantial to herself": Illness, Aging, and Death in A. S. Byatt’s Little Black Book of Stories

      36. – Graham Matthews

      PART VI Historical Engagements
      – Introduction

    36. On the Corpse of a Loved One in the Era of Brain Death: Bioethics and Fictions

      37. – Catherine Belling

    37. Death to the Music of Time: Reticence in Anthony Powell’s Mediated Narratives of Death

      38. – Catherine Hoffmann

    38. Death and Chinese War Television Dramas: (Re)configuring Ethical Judgments in The Disguiser

      39. – W. Michelle Wang

    39. Where Do the Disappeared Go? Writing the Genocide in East Timor

      40. – Kit Ying Lye

    40. "Doubtfull Drede": Dying at the End of the Middle Ages

      41. – Walter Wadiak

    41. Urbanization, Ambiguity, and Social Death in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn

              – Wanlin Li

      42.   Coda

              – Julian Gough

    Biography

    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.

     

    "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

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