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.

"This is a long overdue compendium that covers topics pertaining to death in literature and death and the literary arts from the classical to postmodern and everything between. I highly recommend this 'companion' for scholars at any stage of their studies and general readers whether their interests lie with a specific period, genre, or specialized topic such as medical humanities, death and sleep, trauma, the post-human, and much, much more." --Lesley D. Clement, Lakehead University-Orillia

• IntroductionPART 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 GoodmanPART 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 SchleiferPART 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 CrawfordPART 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 NadelPART 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