Read complete books and articles on: Death in Literature

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7 of the Best Books and Articles on: Death in Literature

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

Love and Death in the American Novel » Read Now
by Leslie A. Fiedler. 512 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN...when the literature of a country...fathers sordid death. Nothing...horrible enough in life, is...horror. Our literature as a...
2.

Last Words: Variations on a Theme in Cultural History » Read Now
by Karl S. Guthke. 250 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Whether Goethe actually cried More light! on his deathbed, or whether Conrad Hilton checked out of this world after uttering Leave the shower curtain on the inside of the tub, last words, regardless of authenticity, have long captured the imagination of Western society. In this playfully serious...
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Whether Goethe actually cried More light! on his deathbed, or whether Conrad Hilton checked out of this world after uttering Leave the shower curtain on the inside of the tub, last words, regardless of authenticity, have long captured the imagination of Western society. In this playfully serious investigation based on factual accounts, anecdotes, literary works, and films, Karl Guthke explores the cultural importance of those words spoken at the border between this world and the next. The exit lines of both famous and ordinary people embody for us a sense of drama and truthfulness and reveal much about our thoughts on living and dying. Why this interest in last words? Presenting statements from such figures as Socrates, Nathan Hale, Marie Antoinette, and Oscar Wilde (I am dying as I have lived, beyond my means), Guthke examines our fascination in terms of our need for closure, our desire for immortality, and our attraction to the mystique of death scenes. The author considers both authentic and invented final statements as he looks at the formation of symbols and legends and their function in our culture. Last words, handed down from generation to generation like cultural heirlooms, have a good chance of surviving in our collective memory. They are shown to epitomize a life, convey a sense of irony, or play to an audience, as in the case of the assassinated Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, who is said to have died imploring journalists: Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something.
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3.

Women and Death: Linkages in Western Thought and Literature » Read Now
by Beth Ann Bassein. 246 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...Goodman Women and Death LINKAGES IN WESTERN THOUGHT AND LITERATURE BETH ANN BASSEIN...Women. 2. Women in literature. 3. Death. I. Title. II...and actuality of death as they...
4.

Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy » Read Now
by Michael Neill. 404 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Issues of Death offers a fresh approach to the tragic drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Starting from the premise that "death" is a historical construct that is differently experienced in every culture, it treats Renaissance tragedy as an instrument for reimagining the human encounter...
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Issues of Death offers a fresh approach to the tragic drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Starting from the premise that "death" is a historical construct that is differently experienced in every culture, it treats Renaissance tragedy as an instrument for reimagining the human encounter with death. Analyses of major plays by Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, Webster, Middleton, and Ford explore the relation of tragedy to the macabre tradition, to the apocalyptic displays of the anatomy theatre, and to the spectacular arts of funeral.
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5.

Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and Black Subjectivity » Read Now
by Sharon Patricia Holland. 236 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Raising the Dead is a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary exploration of death's relation to subjectivity in twentieth-century American literature and culture. Sharon Patricia Holland contends that black subjectivity in particular is connected intimately to death. For Holland, travelling through "the...
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Raising the Dead is a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary exploration of death's relation to subjectivity in twentieth-century American literature and culture. Sharon Patricia Holland contends that black subjectivity in particular is connected intimately to death. For Holland, travelling through "the space of death" gives us, as cultural readers, a nuanced and appropriate metaphor for understanding what is at stake when bodies, discourses, and communities collide.
Holland argues that the presence of blacks, Native Americans, women, queers, and other "minorities" in society is, like death, "almost unspeakable". She gives voice to -- or raises -- the dead through her examination of works such as the movie Menace II Society, Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, Randall Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits, and the work of the all-white, male, feminist hip-hop band Consolidated. In challenging established methods of literary investigation by putting often-disparate voices in dialogue with each other, Holland forges connections among African-American literature and culture, queer and feminist theory.
Raising the Dead will be of interest to students and scholars of American culture, African-American literature, literary theory, gender studies, queer theory, and cultural studies.
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6.

The Monstered Self: Narratives of Death and Performance in Latin American Fiction » Read Now
by Eduardo Gonzalez. 278 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...reach of moral or pragmatic conscience. Death remains unexplained: change protects it...merciless mutability, there are others in which individual transformation...
7.

Desire and Death in the Spanish Sentimental Romance, 1440-1550 » Read Now
by Patricia E. Grieve. 150 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...feature of this literature is the...Even in the best...despair, death as a result...love and death and the interplay of literature and life in these texts...violent death...