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.

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

OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.