Routledge Companion to Death and Literature

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.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction

           PART I Traversing the Ontological Divide
          - Introduction

1. The Final Frontier: Science Fictions of Death

- Brian McHale



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

- Donovan Sherman



3. Death and the Margins of Theatre in Luigi Pirandello

- Daniel K. Jernigan



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

- Jan Alber



5. Literature and the Afterlife

- Alice Bennett



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

- Neil Murphy



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

- Philippe Carrard



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

- Jessica Goodman
PART II Genres
- Introduction


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

- Lesley D. Clement



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

- Karen Coats



11. Death and Mourning in Graphic Narrative

- José Alaniz



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

- Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter



13. Death and the Fanciulla

- Reed Way Dasenbrock



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

- Ronald Schleifer

PART III Site, Space, and Spatiality
- Introduction


15. Ecocide and the Anthropocene: Death and the Environment

- Flore Coulouma



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

- Stacy Thompson



17. Suicide in the Early Modern Elegiac Tradition

- Kelly McGuire



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

- Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh



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

- Samuel Caleb Wee



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

- Ian Tan



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

- Jen Crawford

PART IV Rituals, Memorials, and Epitaphs
- Introduction


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

- Arianna Gullo



23. Fictional Will

- Helen Swift



24. Monumentalism, Death, and Genre in Shakespeare

- John Tangney



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

- Carol Margaret Davison



26. Death, Literature, and the Victorian Era

- Jolene Zigarovich



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

- Angela Frattarola



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

- Laura Davies



29. Biography: Life after Death

- 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

- Christopher Hamilton



31. Paradox, Death, and the Divine

- Jamie Lin
 

32. Inner Seeing and Death Anxiety in Aidan Higgins's Blind Man's Bluff and Other Life Writing
- Lara O'Muirithe


33. Autothanatography and Contemporary Poetry

- Ivan Callus



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

- Rosalía Baena



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

- Graham Matthews

PART VI Historical Engagements
- Introduction


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

- Catherine Belling



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

- Catherine Hoffmann



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

- W. Michelle Wang



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

- Kit Ying Lye



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

- Walter Wadiak



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

          - Wanlin Li
  42.   Coda
          - Julian Gough

Zusammenfassung

This Collection seeks to understand how literature always been deeply engaged with the ever-evolving relationship humanity has with its ultimate demise.

Bericht

"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

Produktdetails

• Autoren: W. Michelle Jernigan Wang
• Mitarbeit: Daniel Jernigan (Herausgeber), Neil Murphy (Herausgeber), Murphy Neil (Herausgeber), W. Michelle Wang (Herausgeber)
• Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Sprache: Englisch
• Produktform: Taschenbuch
• Erschienen: 31.05.2023
• EAN: 9780367619053
• ISBN: 978-0-367-61905-3
• Seiten: 490
• Serie: Routledge Literature Companions
• Themen: Geisteswissenschaften, Kunst, Musik > Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft > Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft; LITERARY CRITICISM / General, Literature: history & criticism, Literature: history and criticism