ABSTRACT
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|86 pages
Traversing the Ontological Divide
chapter 8|8 pages
The View from Upstream
part II|63 pages
Genres
chapter 9|12 pages
Big Questions
chapter 14|14 pages
Death, Literary Form, and Affective Comprehension
part III|86 pages
Site, Space, and Spatiality
chapter 19|10 pages
Death “after Long Silence”
part IV|89 pages
Rituals, Memorials, and Epitaphs
chapter 25|12 pages
Death and Gothic Romanticism
part V|62 pages
Living with Death
chapter 30|9 pages
“An immense expenditure of energy come to nothing”
chapter 35|10 pages
“Grief made her insubstantial to herself”
part VI|62 pages
Historical Engagements