Postmodern Fiction Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Abstract & Contents Page:
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
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