The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature

W. Michelle Wang is Assistant Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Daniel K. Jernigan is Associate Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Neil Murphy is Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Introduction

PART I Traversing the Ontological Divide
– Introduction






The Final Frontier: Science Fictions of Death
– Brian McHale




"Still I Danced": Performing Death in Ford’s The Broken Heart
– Donovan Sherman




Death and the Margins of Theatre in Luigi Pirandello
– Daniel K. Jernigan




Forbidden Mental Fruit? Dead Narrators and Characters from Medieval to Postmodernist Narratives
– Jan Alber




Literature and the Afterlife
– Alice Bennett




The Novel as Heartbeat: The Dead Narrator in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones
– Neil Murphy




Dead Man/and Woman Talking: Narratives from Beyond the Grave
– Philippe Carrard




The View from Upstream: Authority and Projection in Fontenelle’s Nouveaux dialogues des morts
– Jessica Goodman

PART II Genres– Introduction




Big Questions: Re-Visioning and Re-Scripting Death Narratives in Children’s Literature
– Lesley D. Clement




In the U-Bend with Moaning Myrtle: Thinking about Death in YA Literature
– Karen Coats




Death and Mourning in Graphic Narrative
– José Alaniz




Death and Documentaries: Heuristics for the Real in an Age of Simulation
– Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter




Death and the Fanciulla
– Reed Way Dasenbrock




Death, Literary Form, and Affective Comprehension: Primary Emotions and the Neurological Basis of Genre
– Ronald Schleifer

PART III Site, Space, and Spatiality
– Introduction




Ecocide and the Anthropocene: Death and the Environment
– Flore Coulouma




A Disney Death: Coco, Black Panther, and the Limits of the Afterlife
– Stacy Thompson




Suicide in the Early Modern Elegiac Tradition
– Kelly McGuire




Institutions and Elegies: Viewing the Dead in W. B. Yeats and John Wieners
– Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh




Death "after Long Silence": Auditing Agamben’s Metaphysics of Negativity in Yeats’s Lyric
– Samuel Caleb Wee




The Spatialization of Death in the Novels of Virginia Woolf
– Ian Tan




"Memento Mori": memory, Death, and Posterity in Singapore’s Poetry
– Jen Crawford

PART IV Rituals, Memorials, and Epitaphs
– Introduction




Death and the Dead in Verse Funerary Epigrams of Ancient Greece
– Arianna Gullo




Fictional Will
– Helen Swift




Monumentalism, Death, and Genre in Shakespeare
– John Tangney




Death and Gothic Romanticism: Dilating in/upon the Graveyard, Meditating among the Tombs
– Carol Margaret Davison




Death, Literature, and the Victorian Era
– Jolene Zigarovich




The Aura of the Phonographic Relic: Hearing the Voices of the Dead
– Angela Frattarola




Anecdotal Death: Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets
– Laura Davies




Biography: Life after Death
– Ira Nadel

PART V Living with Death: Writing, Mourning, and Consolation
– Introduction




"An immense expenditure of energy come to nothing": Philosophy, Literature, and Death in Peter Weiss’s Abschied von den Eltern
– Christopher Hamilton




Paradox, Death, and the Divine
– Jamie Lin




Inner Seeing and Death Anxiety in Aidan Higgins’s Blind Man’s Bluff and Other Life Writing
– Lara O’Muirithe




Autothanatography and Contemporary Poetry
– Ivan Callus




When Time Stops: Death and Autobiography in Contemporary Personal Narratives
– Rosalía Baena




"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




On the Corpse of a Loved One in the Era of Brain Death: Bioethics and Fictions
– Catherine Belling




Death to the Music of Time: Reticence in Anthony Powell’s Mediated Narratives of Death
– Catherine Hoffmann




Death and Chinese War Television Dramas: (Re)configuring Ethical Judgments in The Disguiser
– W. Michelle Wang




Where Do the Disappeared Go? Writing the Genocide in East Timor
– Kit Ying Lye




"Doubtfull Drede": Dying at the End of the Middle Ages
– Walter Wadiak




Urbanization, Ambiguity, and Social Death in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn

– Wanlin Li

42. Coda

– Julian Gough