ABSTRACT
The literary afterlife is a genre in which a place and time after death are imagined and peopled with dead characters. Place it against the modern elegy, ghost story, or even zombie apocalypse, and the modern literary afterlife seems very much a minor literary form. Nevertheless, the afterlife has inspired a great range of writing and, historically, has served as one of the primary locations for the fantastic or supernatural in literature, from the Classical to the medieval period. Classical descent narratives and medieval visionary literature have been the subject of centuries of careful scholarly reading and explication. Lincoln in the Bardo is set in the cemetery where Willie Lincoln is buried and where the president visits his dead son’s body after the boy’s death. The historical setting is a jarring departure from the scenes of contemporary or near-future life that preoccupied Saunders in his earlier short stories.
