Introduction

Literature has always been deeply engaged with the ever-evolving relationship humanity has with its ultimate demise. It provides a telling demonstration of the myriad ways that humanity has learned to live with the inevitability of death where live with might itself mean any number of things: from consoling, to memorializing, to rationalizing, to fending off, to evading, and to escaping. Of course, the relationship between literary art and death is rarely as poignant as it is when viewed through Keats's tragic early death. In essence, death is always and already fictionalized by the time writers seek it out and reconsider it to their own ends. The sobering coda by novelist Julian Gough extends such considerations of how literature mediates the way the people process traumatic experiences of death.