THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO DEATH AND LITERATURE

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.