The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature

Description

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. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents Contributors Introduction Notes Works Cited Part I. Traversing the Ontological Divide Work Cited 1. The Final Frontier: Science Fictions of Death Motivating the Motif Methuselah's Children Ghosts in Machines How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe The Walking Dead The Last Man Virtual Reality Works Cited 2. "Still I Danced": Performing Death in Ford's The Broken Heart Notes Works Cited 3. Death and the Margins of Theater in Luigi Pirandello Notes Works Cited 4. Forbidden Mental Fruit? Dead Narrators and Characters from Medieval to Postmodernist Narratives Introduction Ontological Complications: Dead Character-Narratorsin Postmodernist Narratives Anticipations of Postmodernism: Dead Characters from the Middle Ages to Science-Fiction Narratives Concluding Remarks Notes Works Cited 5. Literature and the Afterlife Space: "Radical Theming" Time: "The Great Mother-Gift" Voice: "The Result Was Cacophony" Genre as Afterlife Notes Works Cited 6. The Novel as Heartbeat: The Dead Narrator in Mike McCormack's Solar Bones Notes Works Cited 7. Dead Man/and Woman Talking: Narratives from Beyond the Grave Dispositions Enunciations Perspectives Verisimilitude Conclusion(s) Notes Works Cited 8. The View from Upstream: Authority and Projection in Fontenelle's Nouveaux dialogues des morts Works Cited Part II. Genres Work Cited 9. Big Questions: Re-Visioning and Re-Scripting Death Narratives in Children's Literature Cast of Animal Characters Death of Pets and Elderly Family Members Death of Parents Children's Death and Grieving What Is Death? Notes Works Cited Primary Sources Secondary Sources 10. In the U-Bend with Moaning Myrtle: Thinking about Death in YA Literature Plotting Death Individuation and Childhood's End Awareness, Empathy, and Activism Death and the Posthuman Final Thoughts Note Works Cited 11. Death and Mourning in Graphic Narrative Works Cited 12. Death and Documentaries: Heuristics for the Real in an Age of Simulation Basics of Documentary Distinguishing Reality from Irreality Contemplating Responses to Mortality Memento Mori, Memento Vivere Analyzing Death in Documentaries Notes Works Cited Primary Sources Secondary Sources 13. Death and the Fanciulla Notes Works Cited 14. Death, Literary Form, and Affective Comprehension: Primary Emotions and the Neurological Basis of Genre Genre as Etiquette, Language, and a Natural Fact Genre as Etiquette Narrative Genres as a Fact of Language Genre as "Something like a Natural Organism" The Affective Comprehension of Genre Facing Death in Narrative Genres Fearful Irony Blunt Melodrama Blank Tragedy Conclusion: Death and Literary Genre Notes Works Cited Part III. Site, Space, and Spatiality Works Cited 15. Ecocide and the Anthropocene: Death and the Environment Call of the Wild: Death, Mountain, and Forest Spirits in the Japanese Imagination Connemara: Stories of Life and Death The Indian Reservation: Narratives of Loss, Ecocide, and Genocide Ecological Disasters and the Nuclear Apocalypse Notes Works Cited 16. A Disney Death: Coco, Black Panther, and the Limits of the Afterlife Psychoanalysis, or, To Death and Beyond! From Psychoanalysis to the Movies What Is the Purpose of Your Visit? Works Cited 17. Suicide in the Early Modern Elegiac Tradition Notes Works Cited 18. Institutions and Elegies: Viewing the Dead in W. B. Yeats and John Wieners The Visual Space of Modern Elegy Vitality through Death "The Municipal Gallery Revisited" (1937) The Hotel Wentley Poems (1958) The Art of Cruising Art "A Poem for Museum Goers" Notes Works Cited 19. Death "after Long Silence": Auditing Agamben's Metaphysics of Negativity in Yeats's Lyric Note Works Cited 20. The Spatialization of Death in the Novels of Virginia Woolf Introduction Epiphany as Dissolution: The Voyage Out and The Ship of Death After Such Knowledge, What Consolation?: Order and the Limits of Vision in To the Lighthouse Resting Securely in Impermanence: The Waves as Final Statement Conclusion Notes Works Cited 21. "Memento Mori": Memory, Death, and Posterity in Singapore's Poetry Modernization, Death, and Poetic Strategy Grief and the Virtualization of Attachment Edwin Thumboo and the Crafting of Posterity Boey Kim Cheng and Elegiac Distance Yeow Kai Chai and Teeming Presence Works Cited Part IV. Rituals, Memorials, and Epitaphs Works Cited 22. Death and the Dead in Verse Funerary Epigrams of Ancient Greece Notes Works Cited 23. Fictional Will A Matter of Life and Death: Writing on the Brink Writing in Earnest: An Urgent Cause Making Disposition: An Exercise of Will Testis: A Need for Witness Notes Works Cited Primary Sources Secondary Sources 24. Monumentalism, Death, and Genre in Shakespeare Notes Works Cited 25. Death and Gothic Romanticism: Dilating in/upon the Graveyard, Meditating among the Tombs Works Cited 26. Death, Literature, and the Victorian Era The Cult of Mourning and the Commodification of Death Materiality, Relics, and the Body Sex and Death Victorian Gothic Last Words Notes Works Cited 27. The Aura of the Phonographic Relic: Hearing the Voices of the Dead The Aura of the Recorded Voice The Phonographic Recording and the Séance The Phonograph Recording as Part of a Well-Managed Death Note Works Cited 28. Anecdotal Death: Samuel Johnson's Lives of the English Poets This Last Act The Texture of a Discourse Ridiculous Anecdotes Notes Works Cited 29. Biography: Life after Death Notes Works Cited Part V. Living with Death: Writing, Mourning, and Consolation Work Cited 30. "An immense expenditure of energy come to nothing": Philosophy, Literature, and Death in Peter Weiss's Abschied von den Eltern Notes Works Cited 31. Paradox, Death, and the Divine Death and Agency Death and Meaning The Numinous Heart of Paradox Notes Works Cited 32. Inner Seeing and Death Anxiety in Aidan Higgins's Blind Man's Bluff and Other Life Writing Introduction Visual Images Inner Vision and Familiar Forms Conclusion Works Cited 33. Autothanatography and Contemporary Poetry Works Cited 34. When Time Stops: Death and Autobiography in Contemporary Personal Narratives Note Works Cited 35. "Grief made her insubstantial to herself": Illness, Aging, and Death in A. S. Byatt's Little Black Book of Stories Introduction Postmemory, Grief, and Death Aging, Illness, and Death Dementia Narratives and Grief before Death Conclusion Notes Works Cited PART VI. Historical Engagements Works Cited 36. On the Corpse of a Loved One in the Era of Brain Death: Bioethics and Fictions Two Kinds of Dead Irreversibility Fictions Works Cited 37. Death to the Music of Time Reticence in Anthony Powell's Mediated Narratives of Death Introduction: Narration by Proxy - Anthony Powell's Corpseless Danse Macabre Dramatization, Suspense, and Tragic Irony The Unnamable Pilgrim's Progress Conclusion: "Lack of Outward Display" or the Affecting Power of Narrative under Control Notes Works Cited 38. Death and Chinese War Television Dramas: (Re)configuring Ethical Judgments in The Disguiser Contextual Frames Of Mortal Economies and Ethical Hierarchies Final Remarks Notes Works Cited 39. Where Do the Disappeared Go? Writing the Genocide in East Timor Understanding the Santa Cruz Massacre in Dili The Silence Surrounding the Event Implications of Silence Conclusion Notes Works Cited 40. "Doubtfull Drede" Dying at the End of the Middle Ages Notes Works Cited 41. Urbanization, Ambiguity, and Social Death in Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn Notes Works Cited 42. Coda Index