Dissertations / Theses: 'Death in literature'

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Snoddy, Ashley Marie. "Death and Dying in Adolescent Literature." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1394210773.

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Clair, Erin C. "Death becomes her modernism, femininity, and the erotics of death /." Diss., Columbia, Mo. : University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10355/5973.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007.
The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on March 6, 2008) Includes bibliographical references.

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Meyer, Basil. "Consumptive death in Victorian literature, 1830-1880." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2001. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/1654.

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Victorian medical men, writers, relatives of the dying and consumptive sufferers themselves seized on the narrative potential of representations of the disease in a variety of ways. I argue that both medical and lay writers subscribed to a common set of beliefs about the disease and that medical knowledge, moreover, shared a common narrative way of knowing and understanding it. I analyse aspects of general clinical expository texts, including accompanying illustrations, showing how a narrative knowledge of death and the tubercular body was elaborated. Furthermore, I show how documents used in the compilation of medical statistics on the cause of death were fundamentally narrative through their reliance on case narratives. It is demonstrated that Dickens uses a seldom noticed consumptive death and decline to offset his heroine's development in Bleak House, in ways similar to those developed in Jane Eyre. Similarly, it is shown that Mrs Gaskell's use of a consumptive alcoholic 'fallen woman' unsettles her account of her heroine in Mary Barton. George Eliot's 'Janet's Repentance' is analysed, showing how the psychological struggle between an orientation towards life or death is played out across both alcoholism and consumption. I also examine how consumption presents a narrative opportunity whereby plots involving setbacks in love are resolved through women's consumptive deaths in popular fiction by Rhoda Broughton,Ladv Georgiana Fullerton and others. Through an examination of the Journal of Emily Shore and accounts of other actual deaths, I illustrate how experiences and accounts of consumptive deaths were structured and rendered intelligible through reliance on beliefs encountered in both fiction and medicine. In conclusion, the thesis alerts readers to the presence of signifiers of consumption in Victorian texts, showing how various narrative strategies are integral to any understanding of representations of its dying victims

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Meduri, Matthew Paul. "The Death of Lily." Kent State University / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1366242013.

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Miranda, Mariana de Melo. "Marriage, transgression and death: Wuthering heights and The awakening." Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 2012. http://www.bdtd.uerj.br/tde_busca/arquivo.php?codArquivo=4706.

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Esta dissertação tem como objetivo analisar a situação da vida da mulher durante o século XIX, na Inglaterra e nos Estados Unidos da América, através de duas obras do século XIX: Wuthering Heights (1847) de Emile Brontë e The Awakening (1889) de Kate Chopin. Objetivamos, na presente dissertação, apontar a crítica dos discursos patriarcal e das práticas de poder social que tornaram o contexto social das mulheres representadas nos romances citados, propício para a anulação da expressão erótica e repressão. O objeto da análise restringiu-se às duas personagens principais dos romances, Catherine Earnshaw e Edna Pontellier; personagens cujas subjetividades foram reprimidas através da imposição e desempenho de papéis sociais que não as satisfaziam como mulheres
The present work aims at analyzing the situation of women's lives during the nineteenth-century in England and the United States of America, in two nineteenth-century novels: Wuthering Heights (1847), by Emile Brontë and The Awakening (1889), by Kate Chopin. Our objective in this study is to point out the patriarchal discourses and practices of social power that made the social context of the women represented in the mentioned novels, suitable for the annulment of erotic expression. The object of the analysis was restricted to the two main characters of the novels Catherine Earnshaw and Edna Pontellier, whose subjectivities have been suppressed through the imposition and performance of social roles that do not fulfil them as women

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Jackson, Margaret Jane. "An exploration of children's literature and death, 1890-2010." Thesis, Durham University, 2018. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/12607/.

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Death is often considered to be a taboo subject, even more so when we try to think about addressing the subject with children. Nonetheless, it is an important subject which impacts the lives of all of us and often as children. Finding the way in which the subject has been dealt with for children can be problematic; however, it is possible to explore this subject via the medium of children’s literature. This exploration uses both books, which are text only and also picture books. This thesis uses a social constructionist perspective to explore notions of the ‘child’ and childhood’, which assumes that no concepts have a pre-existing, given nature and that all things are shaped by culture and history. By exploring the ways in which concepts of ‘child’ and childhood’ have altered over time it is then possible to consider and analyse how the subject of death has been presented and, altered overtime, within children’s literature Books are also constructions and here they have been analysed to offer some insight into what has been deemed suitable subject matter for a child to read and thus to allow prevailing attitudes towards children across the 120 year period of the study to be explored. The study uses a sample from three periods within the 120 year time span: 1890-1910, 1950-1970 and 1990-2010. Comparison of the ways in which death has been addressed within each period is considered alongside prevailing notions of ‘the child’. Thematic analysis is used to analyse the books and serves to point up the more surprising findings where death has been addressed in a direct manner across the 120 years. Although it is clear that the subject has been addressed directly in terms of language used (dead, died) what is also clear is from the 1890’s to 2010 it is the construction of childhood prevalent at the time that alters and thus impacts what can deemed suitable for children.

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Robertson, James Andrew. "Selfhood, boundaries, and death in maritime literature, 1768-1834." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2016. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/16343/.

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This thesis interrogates the role of the sea’s agency in the construction and mediation of selfhood in travel narratives and poetry from the period 1768-1834. The sea in these texts functions to challenge and modify selfhood, both of seafarers and those mourning the loss of someone at sea. Its instability and inherent hostility to human life positions it as a threat, requiring a response in order to preserve the self. These challenges to selfhood are presented as a series of boundaries that are either crossed or reinforced. The sea facilitates travel that literally crosses boundaries – longitude, latitude, and nation, for example – as well as reaffirms them, such as the need for the solid footing of ship or shore to survive. Present in all these engagements with the sea is death, positioned as the final boundary to be transgressed. In chapter one the journals of Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks are interrogated to expose the influence the sea has on selfhood during voyages of exploration, and how it influences Cook’s legacy. It also explores the potential connection between the journals and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’. Chapter two explores the sublime in the narrative of John Byron, before looking at its function and the agency of the sea in the nautical poems of Lord Byron. Chapter three investigates the topic of elegy in the poetry of William Wordsworth, looking at whether, as a poetic form, the elegy can function as a grave for those who are lost at sea. Chapter four continues this interrogation of elegy in the works of Louisa Stuart Costello and Charlotte Smith. In the conclusion, I draw together these threads, using the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley to demonstrate the effect the sea’s agency has on selfhood.

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Sasser, Marvin Tyler. "The advent of denial of death in children's literature." Click here to access thesis, 2008. http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/etd/archive/summer2008/marvin_t_sasser/Sasser_Marvin_t_200808_ma.pdf.

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Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia Southern University, 2008.
"A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Georgia Southern University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts." Directed by Richard Flynn. ETD. Includes bibliographical references (p. 110-124)

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Rounick, Adam. "Death By Pop Rocks and Pepsi: Stories." Cleveland State University / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1524820283355231.

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May, Stephen. "Life! Death! Prizes! : resisting generic representation." Thesis, University of Huddersfield, 2016. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/34459/.

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This project contains the novel 'Life! Death! Prizes!' which was published by Bloomsbury in the UK in April 2012 and in the USA in September 2012. 'Life! Death! Prizes!' was later translated into German as Wir Kommen Schon Klar and published by Berlin Verlag in 2013. The novel was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and The Guardian Not The Booker Prize. The commentary which accompanies the novel explores the starting points for the book, which were my dissatisfaction with my work as a television storyliner on Emmerdale and my discovery of the world of story contained within ‘real life’ magazines such as Chat, Bella, Pick It Up, Love It, Take A Break etc. In the commentary I will explore the narrative strategies used to build an accessible literary novel that borrows from the structure of a ‘real life’ magazine story while observing closely the society we are living in. A novel that explores the nature of the contemporary family and what it is to be a young man trying to build a life in 21st century Britain. In the first chapter I look at how my ostensibly realist and voice-driven novel uses the folk tale Hansel and Gretel and techniques borrowed from ancient Greek drama, as well as exploiting the possibilities and challenges offered by the use of both generic instability and unreliable narration. The second chapter investigates more explicitly the politics of the novel. In this chapter I seek to address how the police, education, local government workers, the law and social services are represented in popular culture and how far these representations are supported, critiqued or challenged by the unreliable narration in 'Life! Death! Prizes!' In both chapters I will assess the current landscape of contemporary fiction and describe where my novel fits within it.

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Erasmo, Mario. "The death of Turnus in the "Aeneid"." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/5592.

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BjrÃ¸erud, Andreas. "Beckett, Celine, Lacan : the death of 'man'." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1993. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.357306.

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Tredennick, Bianca Page. "Mortal remains : death and materiality in nineteenth-century British literature /." view abstract or download file of text, 2002. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3061968.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002.
Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 218-225). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

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Avalon, Jillian. "Life and Death: Spiritual Philosophy in Anna Karenina." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2013. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/772.

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This paper examines the structure, title, epigraph, and spiritual philosophy of Leo Tolstoy’s great novel, Anna Karenina. The intricate structure of the novel can leave more questions than it answers, and as the novel was written at such a critical, complex time of Tolstoy’s life, the ideas the characters struggle with in Anna Karenina are of both daily and cosmic importance. Considering influences and criticism of the novel, the method of Tolstoy’s vision of living well as shown in Anna Karenina leads to a very specific and intricate spiritual philosophy. It is also found that the novel’s structure and title are in conflict.

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Papanghelis, T. D. "Propertius : A Hellenistic poet on love and death." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.372281.

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Reed-Mundell, Jason. "The Poet Debates With His Friend's Mistress, Death." Cleveland State University / OhioLINK, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1402701606.

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Deans, Sharon. "Teen Gothic : sex, death and autonomy in young adult Gothic literature." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/15908.

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Adolescence – that tricky time when children have not yet reached adulthood – is a time of much disturbance, change and growth. Faced with a body that changes, stretches and grows in all directions, as does the mind, the adolescent finds that they are not who they once were, and that their concerns are not what they once were. According to David Punter, the nature of adolescence is integral to Gothic writing; for him, adolescence can be seen as a time when there is a fantasised inversion of boundaries: ‘where what is inside finds itself outside (acne, menstrual blood, rage) and what we think should be visibly outside (heroic dreams, attractiveness, sexual organs) remain resolutely inside and hidden’ (Punter 1998, 6). However, this is to ‘Gothicise’ adolescents - to view adolescents themselves as Gothic beings – rather than to understand what the true nature of their concerns and fears really are. This thesis intends to investigate, therefore, those fears and concerns as they are represented through the medium of Gothic texts written for adolescents. I propose to examine what happens to the Gothic mode in the gap between young children’s literature and adult fiction and will look at, through the Gothic lens, Young Adult literature which explores the teenager's relationships with issues such as sex, death and autonomy. As the Gothic is ‘erotic at root’ (Punter 1996, 191) and often focused on the centrality of sexuality, I explore the nature of ‘changing bodies’ and consider the adolescent’s burgeoning sexuality and desire for romantic relationships; however, the Gothic is not just about sex, and I also examine adolescent engagement with the concept of death, before finally going on to study issues of adolescent power and autonomy.

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Schuetze, Sarah. "More Than Death: Fear of Illness in American Literature 1775-1876." UKnowledge, 2015. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/18.

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This dissertation argues that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century narratives about personal and collective experiences with disease train American readers to fear illness while warning them against the dangers of being afraid. Such narratives depict the way illness ravages the physical body, disrupts interpersonal relationships, and threatens to dismantle social or municipal organization. In other words, the story of sickness is a story of terror-inducing dis-order. I study disease with a lens informed by cultural and disability studies to show that what makes disease historically and culturally significant is its power—through the body—to dis-order relationships, society, and knowledge. Anxieties about this dis-order did not go dormant when an epidemic faded; they continued to circulate in writing, their vigor magnifying with each new outbreak. Through extensive archival research into representations of disease in ephemera, popular publications, and medical writing, my dissertation proffers a new reading of canonical works depicting sickness. Literary works gothicize disease by dramatizing its possible effects that make life unrecognizable, thus feeding fears as they portray them. My analysis shows that works like John and Abigail Adams’s letters, Abigail Abbot Bailey’s memoir, editorials from Nathaniel Parker Willis, novels like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig are as invested in the fear of illness as disease narratives by Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allan Poe that are traditionally read as gothic. While scholars may recognize the significance of disease-induced fear in any of these individual texts, they treat each example as unique whereas I show literary authors contribute to a broader cultural anxiety spawned on the pages of popular media and spread through belles-lettres. To emphasize the relationship between the circulation of information and the circulation of disease, each chapter focuses on one disease and the written or print form that participated in sharing and shaping opinions about the disease as a terrifying event: smallpox and letters, yellow fever and pamphlets, cholera and periodicals, and tuberculosis and sentimental novels.

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Harradine, David John. "Chronographies : performance, death and the writing of time." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2005. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/1855.

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This thesis explores the interconnecting themes of time, death and the subjective in relation to performance, the performative and the critical act of writing. It is structured as a heterogenous series of case studies of a range of performed and petformative events, each offering a focus for an investigation of how the key terms of time and death operate in and around that event, and of how those terms lead to other areas of investigation. It deploys analytical and conceptual frameworks from, amongst others, the disciplines of psychoanalysis, queer theory, cultural studies, the visual arts, literary theory and performance studies to develop a series of interdisciplinary readings of subjects including the perfonnative construction of subjectivity, the temporality of photography, the temporal and spatial aspects of domestic architecture in relation to performance and installation, and the epistolary exchange as performance event. The thesis also addresses the problematics of how to engage in the process of critical writing in response to the ephemerality of performance, and theorises "performative writing" in relation to the broader themes of time and death. A range of textual forms are deployed in the text, including fictional autobiography, love letters, instructions for scientific experiments, prose poems and fragmented essays in multiple voices. By repeatedly reinventing the form through which the writing is presented, the thesis also implicitly explores the limits of textuality in the context of the creation and presentation of the doctoral thesis itself.

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Powar, Amardeep. "Death education in nursing and medical curricula : an integrative literature review." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/51994.

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Death is an inevitable experience for each individual. Although death is a natural human experience, the avoidance of death is an issue in the culture at large. This isolation of death and dying also is evident in the health professions of nursing and medicine. Despite the fact that death and dying has received considerably more scholarly attention over time, relatively little attention has been given to the topic of death education. This study explores the literature on death education within nursing and medicine from the 1970s onwards. Using an integrative literature review, scholarly articles were reviewed to determine how death education is enacted or made real in the health care environment, particularly in the nursing and medical curricula. This study examines how educators have taught the topic of death and dying over time and how an analysis of these past experiences may inform current education on death related concepts within health professional fields. The lack of attention to death and dying in nursing and medical curricula affects the confidence and competence that health care professionals have in managing these situations. Although death is a common occurrence in the health care environment, there remains a gap in how educators are supported to teach these concepts to students. The analysis of scholarly literature from the 1970s until the present reveals three themes. The avoidance of death in the culture at large, the importance of psychosocial aspects of care, and the lack of support for educators are three over-arching themes. The main recommendations for educators teaching death related topics appearing in the literature reviewed center on ensuring student contact with terminally ill and dying patients in the clinical setting as a way to learn about the dying process, use of simulation based learning, encouraging collaboration amongst the interdisciplinary team to meet patient and family needs, and the use of explicit competencies related to end-of-life care to ensure consistency amongst all students. The findings from this review are relevant for student learning, educator preparation, and may also influence how educators in the health professions incorporate death and dying concepts into their curricula.
Applied Science, Faculty of
Nursing, School of
Graduate

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Leavy, Deon G. "Facilitating communication about death between mothers and adolescent sons using fictional children's literature." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 2005. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd1049.pdf.

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Morgan, Thomas Winston. "Homoeroticism and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice." PDXScholar, 1994. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/4798.

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In the late 1970s and early 1980s, previously unpublished portions of Thomas Mann's diaries were released for publication. These excerpts contained passages that removed all previous doubt as to Mann's sexual proclivities, affirming his homosexual inclinations. It had been suspected that Mann was homosexual before this time, but there was no conclusive proof until the release of the now-famous (or infamous) diary entries. Now that there is written proof of Mann's sexual orientation, literary scholars can more persuasively argue the often overlooked or circumvented homosexual aspects of his writings. This thesis is an investigation of the homoerotic elements in Thomas Mann's novella, Death in Venice. The present study draws out the homoerotic elements of the text and places them in a socio-historical context. Textual analysis, as it concerns coded homosexual desire, as well as a biographical schema of Mann highlight the homoerotic characterizations in the novella. The analysis is based in an historical context, a time when homosexual expression was strictly illegal. The tension created between Mann's need to process his homosexuality and his internal moral code - as well as the external moral code of Wilhelmine Germany - forced him to contrive a story in which he could only present homosexual desire in code or via allusions to the homosexuality of Ancient Greece.

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Martin, Michael Sean. "Imaginative Thanatopsis: Death and the 19th-Century American Subject." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2009. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/41295.

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English
Ph.D.
In my dissertation, I intend to focus on the way that supernaturalism was produced and disseminated as a cultural category in 19th-century American fiction and non-fiction. In particular, my argument will be that 19th-century authors incorporated supernaturalism in their work to a large degree because of changing death practices at the time, ranging from the use of embalming to shifts in accepted mourning rituals to the ability to record the voices of the dead, and that these supernatural narratives are coded ways for these authors to rethink and grapple with the complexities of these shifting practices. Using Poe's "A Tale of Ragged Mountains" (1844) and Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), Alcott's Little Women (1868), Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables (1851), Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Brockden Brown's Weiland (1798), Phelps' short fiction, Shaker religious writings, and other texts, I will argue that 19th-century narration, instead of being merely aligned with an emerging public sphere and the development of oratory, relied heavily on thanatoptic or deceased narrators, the successive movement of the 18th-century British graveyard poets. For writers who focused on mesmerism and mesmerized subjects, the supernatural became a vehicle for creating a type of "negative freedom," or coded, limitless space from which writers such as Margaret Fuller and Harriet Martineau could imagine their own death and do so without being scandalous. The 19th-century Shaker "visitations," whereby spirits of the dead were purported to speak through certain Shaker religionists, present a unique supernatural phenomenon, since this discrete culture also engaged with coded ways for rethinking death practices and rituals through their supernatural narratives. Meanwhile, such shifting cultural practices associated with death and its rituals also lead, I will argue, to the development of a new literary trope: the disembodied child narrator, as used first in Brockden Brown's novel and then in Melville's fiction, for example. Finally, I will finish my dissertation with a chapter that, while also considering how thanatoptic narrative is used in literary supernaturalism, will focus more on spaces, mazes, and, to use Benjamin's term in The Arcades Project (tran. 1999), arcades that marked 19th-century culture and architecture and how this change in space - and subsequent thanatoptic geography in 19th-century fiction - was at least partially correlated to shifting death practices. I see this project as contributing to 19th-century American scholarship on death practices and literature, including those by Ann Douglas, Karen Sanchez-Eppler and Russ Castronovo, but doing so by arguing that the literary mechanism of supernaturalism and the gothic acted as categories or vehicles for rethinking and reconsidering actual death practices, funeral rituals, and related haunted technology (recordings, daguerreotypes) at the time.
Temple University--Theses

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Ross, Marion E. "Schopenhauer and Beckett : 'knights with death and devil'." Thesis, University of Ulster, 1987. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.329516.

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Castellani, Brenda M. ""Once we stop denying death": Fear, Death and the Postmodern Generation in White Noise." University of Toledo Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=uthonors1450431284.

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Vrtis, Christina E. 1979. ""Death is the Only Reality": a Folkloric Analysis of Notions of Death and Funerary Ritual in Contemporary Caribbean Women's Literature." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10697.

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viii, 91 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.
Caribbean cultural ideas and values placed on death and mourning, especially in relation to cultural roles women are expected to perform, are primary motivating factors in the development of female self and identity in Caribbean women's literature. Based on analysis of three texts, QPH, Annie John, and Beyond the Limbo Silence, I argue that notions of death and funerary rituals are employed within Caribbean women's literature to (re)connect protagonist females to their homeland and secure a sense of identity. In addition, while some texts highlight the necessity of prescribing to the socially constructed roles of women within the ritual context and rely on the uproper" adherence to the traditional process to maintain the status quo, other texts show that the inversion or subversion of these traditions is also an important aspect of funerary rituals and notions of death that permeate contemporary Caribbean culture.
Committee in Charge: Dr. Dianne Dugaw, Folklore; Dr. Lisa Gilman, English; Dr. Phil Scher, Anthropology

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Migliavacca, Adriano Moraes. "Death and the King’s Horseman : analysis and translation into portuguese." reponame:Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UFRGS, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10183/186109.

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Na moderna literatura africana, poucos autores se destacam tanto quanto o dramaturgo, poeta, ensaísta, memorialista e ficcionista nigeriano, de origem iorubá, Wole Soyinka, internacionalmente célebre e ganhador do Prêmio Nobel de Literatura em 1986. Soyinka é conhecido sobretudo como dramaturgo, e seu teatro se caracteriza pelo uso de uma variedade de gêneros literários, formas, linguagens extraliterárias, como a dança e a música, e outros recursos relacionados à cultura iorubá. A obra de Soyinka, escrita em inglês, incorpora tanto elementos das literaturas ocidentais quanto das africanas, e seu inglês é marcado pela constante visitação da oralidade iorubá em provérbios, metáforas e fragmentos de poemas tradicionais assim como sua dramaturgia incorpora elementos do teatro tradicional de seu povo. Acima de tudo, seus enredos, que incluem temas atuais como corrupção, lutas por poder e conflitos entre o indivíduo e seu grupo, estão alicerçados na visão de mundo e cosmogonia iorubá, contendo ainda diversas referências mitológicas e rituais. Em outras palavras, Wole Soyinka se caracteriza, antes de tudo, como um escritor iorubá, cuja obra, cosmopolita em seus temas e conflitos, encontra suas raízes e enquadramento filosófico na visão de mundo de seu povo. É nessa forte presença de elementos iorubás que se encontra um dos maiores interesses das obras de Wole Soyinka para o Brasil. Sabemos que, nos últimos tempos, está havendo uma considerável valorização de elementos de origem africana presentes na cultura nacional, dentre eles, os encontrados nas religiões de matriz africana, que se mostram verdadeiros repositórios de mitos e símbolos de grande riqueza semântica. Tais mitos e símbolos presentes nessas religiões são majoritariamente de origem iorubá. Ler a obra de Soyinka no Brasil, portanto, é buscar uma nova forma de se relacionar com esses elementos e de valorizá-los em sua dimensão literária. Entre as peças de Wole Soyinka, a mais conhecida é provavelmente Death and the King’s Horseman, publicada em 1975 e com diversas realizações teatrais na Nigéria, Estados Unidos e Reino Unido. Baseada em uma situação real na Nigéria colonial, em que um costume do povo iorubá entrou em conflito com a ordem britânica, tal peça é aquela em que visão de mundo e mitologia iorubá estão mais bem articuladas com uma linguagem rica em gêneros e fragmentos da literatura oral iorubá, sendo particularmente proveitosa para uma aproximação cultural. Esta tese oferece uma análise da peça baseada em noções da cultura, da mitologia e da visão de mundo iorubá e nas teorias estéticas e metafísicas do próprio Wole Soyinka. Destacam-se nesta análise os aspectos simbólicos, míticos e metafísicos, assim como os estéticos. Essa análise é precedida de um estudo sobre dimensões da cultura iorubá importantes para o entendimento da peça, tais como história, religião, mitologia, filosofia e artes. Em seguida, as teorias estéticas de Wole Soyinka são estudadas sobre o pano de fundo das discussões literárias vigentes na África no período em que Soyinka engendrava tais teorias. É a partir desses elementos que a peça é analisada. Acima de tudo, esta tese oferece uma tradução de Death and the King’s Horseman que busca valorizar seu conteúdo lírico, suas várias linguagens e suas perspectivas filosóficas, com base nos estudos que foram feitos nos capítulos precedentes, concluindo a tese com observações sobre o processo de tradução.
In modern African literature, few authors stand out as much as the Nigerian playwright, poet, essayist, memorialist, and novelist, of Yoruba origin, Wole Soyinka, internationally acknowledged as the winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature. Soyinka is known above all as a playwright, and his theatre is characterized by the use of a variety of literary genres, forms, extra-literary languages, such as dance and music, and other resources related to Yoruba culture. Soyinka’s work, written in English, includes elements from both Western and African literatures, and his English is marked by the constant presence of Yoruba orality in proverbs, metaphors and fragments of traditional poems as much as his dramaturgy embodies elements of the traditional theatre of his people. Above all, his plots, in such current themes as corruption, struggle for power and conflicts between individual and the community, are stippled on Yoruba worldview and cosmogony, containing as well many mythological and ritual references. In other words, Wole Soyinka characterizes himself, above all, as a Yoruba writer, whose work finds its roots and philosophical framework in the worldview of his people. It is in the strong presence of Yoruba elements in virtually all the ambits that we find one of the greatest interests of Soyinka’s works for Brazil. It is well-known that, in later years, there has been an increasing valuation and interest for elements of African origin in national culture, including those found in African-Brazilian religions, which are actually pools of myths and symbols of great semantic wealth. These myths and symbols found in those religions are, in their majority, of Yoruba origin. Reading Soyinka’s works in Brazil, therefore, is a way of relating to these elements and valuing them in their literary dimension. Among Soyinka’s works, the best-known is probably Death and the King’s Horseman, published in 1975 and with many productions in Nigeria, the United States and the United Kingdom. Based on an actual event that took place in colonial Nigeria, in which a Yoruba native habit conflicted with the British rule, this play is the one in which Yoruba mythology and worldview are best articulated with language that is rich in genres and fragments of Yoruba oral literature, being particularly fruitful for a cultural encounter. This dissertation offers an analysis of the play base on notions of Yoruba culture, mythology, and worldview and on Soyinka’s own aesthetic and metaphysical theories. This analysis highlights the symbolical, mythical and metaphysical, as well as aesthetic aspects. It is preceded by a study on important dimensions of Yoruba culture for the understanding of the play, such as history, religion, mythology, philosophy and arts. After that, Wole Soyinka’s aesthetic theories are studied against the background of the current literary discussions in Africa at the time. It is from these elements that the play is studied. Above all, this dissertation offers a translation of Death and the King’s Horseman that values its lyrical content, its many artistic languages and its philosophical perspectives based on the studies conducted in previous chapters and concluding with observations about the translation process.

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Penrose, Barbara Margaret. "Death and the mother in the life of Jean Genet." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 1996.

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Moss, J. "Wordsworth's 'Excursion' and the place of death in romantic poetry." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1986. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.375990.

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Devey, Alyssa. "Death as Meridian: Paul Celan's Translations of Emily Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for Death" and "Let down the Bars, Oh Death"." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2016. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/5936.

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Paul Celan's translations of Emily Dickinson's poems Because I could not stop for Death and Let down the Bars, Oh Death illuminate the global metaphor inherent in both poems' exploration of death. Celan's The Meridian speech, coupled with Dickinson's poems I saw no way and Tell all the truth, suggest that language can move in different directions across a globe at the same time. When these different lines meet, they reach a meridian of the spiritual and the material. As Celan translates Dickinson's two poems, he uses this global metaphor to place more emphasis on death and to further illuminate how ambiguity is used in the poems to represent what death is, thus highlighting Dickinson's original project in her death poems.

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Brown, Katharine A. "The life and death of Everyman." Theological Research Exchange Network (TREN), 1998. http://www.tren.com.

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Ozimec, Cassady James. "The death of an escargot (or strange feelings of Petrov) and & stories." Thesis, California State University, Long Beach, 2014. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=1528017.

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The creative content contained within this thesis is comprised of two collections of short stories: The Death of an Escargot (or Strange Feelings of Petrov) and & Stories. Together, these story collections represent the fruits of my labors as a student of the M.F.A. program at California State University at Long Beach. The Death of an Escargot (or Strange Feelings of Petrov) is a story cycle that places emphasis on experimentation and creative possibility. The second section, & Stories, represents my engagement with more traditional methods, as well as an earnest attempt at giving voice to distinct communities that are often under-represented within the literary cannon. It is my intention that these stories be understood as representations of my interests as a writer, as well as artifacts to be considered as aides in the formation of my own creative identity.

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Poon, Wan-lam Elizabeth, and 潘尹琳. "Death, existence and limit in the works of Maurice Blanchot." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2005. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B4500755X.

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Lafontaine, Andrée. "De la mort baroque à la mort classique; suivi de, Oraison funèbre." Thesis, McGill University, 1991. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=60604.

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The critique entitled "De la mort baroque a la mort classique" studies three authors and two ways to look at death. Montaigne, in a humanist perspective, focuses on what precedes death. Life is what matters. Death, within the baroque space, invites a celebration of life. Bossuet and Pascal, in a classical religious perspective, concentrate on what follows death. Eternal life is their main preoccupation at the expense of life on earth. Within the classical space, death is celebrated as the door to eternity.
The fiction entitled "Oraison funebre" tells the story of a death and the questioning it evokes. Woven into it is the story of the "little" deaths that take place in the course of a life.

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Heung, Kak-lam Jimmy, and 香格琳. "A comparative study of the themes of Yoshimoto Banana's "First phase Banana": Tugumi, N.P. and Amurita." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2006. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B35802613.

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Vazquez, Amber Susan Cobb. "Common Ends| Death and the Poor in the Time of Dickens." Thesis, The George Washington University, 2014. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3607679.

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Representations of death in nineteenth-century British literature highlight the shared experiences of the poor and working classes and give voice to their common fears and perceptions. The poor negotiate their connection to the past, present, and future via spaces associated with death, which is indicative of the desperation of their situation as well as their differences from the middle and upper classes. This dissertation focuses on the period between the 1830s and early 1860s, a time of intense political activity by and concerning the poor. Charles Dickens, sympathetic to the lower classes and keenly attuned to his culture, offers a wealth of material to theorize the relationships between death, poverty, and literature. I also include texts by authors such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot, as well as less-studied writers such as Thomas Noel, W.J. Linton, and Thomas Cooper.

The first chapter focuses on the workhouse, whose association with death arises from the lower-classes’ widespread fear of dying inside workhouse walls. In the second chapter, I argue that walking funeral processions transform the landscape, which becomes a space for social reunion and highlights the importance of mobility to class identity. Chapter three considers how the grave is used to recall the past and to contemplate the future in Dickens’s novels and in the works of Chartist poets. The fourth, and final, chapter explores the afterlife as a site to comment on and imaginatively correct the plight of the poor. The coda focuses on Our Mutual Friend (1865) to analyze briefly the use of the river as a space of death that encapsulates both danger and redemption.

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Maher, Martina. "The death of Finn mac Cumaill." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2018. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/30591/.

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Finn mac Cumaill (Fionn Mac Cumhaill) has always been a popular figure in Gaelic tradition, coming to full prominence during the Early Modern period, as Fenian stories (tales of Finn and his fían, or fianna, known as fianaigecht in Old Irish and fiannaíocht in Modern Irish) become ever more popular in manuscript form. Despite the popularity that both Finn and the Finn Cycle have enjoyed in Gaelic literature, mentions of Finn's death are scant and tales recounting the event are even rarer. In the extant medieval Irish literature, the pinnacle of the corpus, Acallam na Senórach, not only holds the events in relative obscurity but its presentation of the circumstances of Finn's death may even be said to be conflicting. In looking at other tales in the fíanaigecht corpus, while we find a number of references to the fact than Finn dies, only a few depict his demise, namely Aided Finn and Tesmolta Cormaic ocus Aided Finn. To this short list of narratives detailing Finn's death and the events preceding it, we can add the tale designated 'The Chase of Síd na mBan Finn and the Death of Finn' (henceforth 'The Chase') preserved in a single manuscript, London, British Library, MS Egerton 1782. Although the tale breaks off with Finn still alive, albeit weary and bloodied and standing alone encircled by his adversaries, his death is a logical next element in the narrative, not least because there is repeated mention of a prophecy of his demise throughout the tale. This tale, which spans eight manuscript pages, seems to be the longest engagement with the idea of Finn's death in the medieval and Early Modern Irish corpora, yet has been the subject of very little scholarly investigation to date. This regrettable lacuna in scholarship on Fenian literature is the starting point for this thesis, which presents a three-pronged investigation of 'The Chase'. Following a fuller introduction to the topic in Chapter 1, the history of the manuscript is examined afresh in Chapter 2 as new evidence, particularly from the works of the scribe Muiris Ó Gormáin, has shed new light on the manuscript's history and on the tale of 'The Chase'. This is then employed to examine the section of the manuscript in which 'The Chase' is to be found, a section consisting of four tales thought to be from the now lost manuscript, Cín Dromma Snechtai, and four fíanaigecht tales. It is investigated if the unit may be considered a deliberate anthology and whether thematic and/or other concerns motivated the unit's compilation. Next, the study turns to the tale of 'The Chase' itself, examining its place within a continuum of traditions found in Old, Middle and Early Modern Irish treatments of Finn's death. Based on my own linguistic work on 'The Chase', a semi-diplomatic edition of which is included as an appendix to this thesis, it is demonstrated in Chapter 3 that the author of 'The Chase' seems to have been aware of several accounts of Finn's death, either those which are now extant or sources akin to them, and sought to bring together many of the elements present in other accounts of Finn's death in a single tale, perhaps in what was intended to be a comprehensive death tale for Finn. The various elements of the tale which resonate with the event of or events leading up to Finn's death, however, have not merely been cobbled together. Rather it is illustrated that the composition skilfully treats of the themes of death, prophecy and youth versus age, making regular allusion to the audience's presumed knowledge of other tales of the Fenian corpus, while adhering to the norms of earlier written fíanaigecht literature, a trait not always found in Early Modern tales of the Finn Cycle. The last study which forms part of this thesis, Chapter 4, arose from the recognition that although 'The Chase' appears to be the longest extant engagement with Finn's death, there exists no study that details what material on Finn's death has circulated in the modern period. This section provides a comprehensive overview of modern engagements with Finn's death in post-1650 manuscripts and folklore collections. All the modern accounts that I have found to date in which Finn's death is recounted or in which it is presumed that Finn is dead, which are usually mentions of Finn's grave, are therefore identified, presented, and where applicable, translated. While it becomes clear that no other engagement with Finn's demise across the eleven centuries during which his death excited the Gaelic imagination is as long or as complex as 'The Chase', common or notable motifs in the modern accounts are identified, and similarities between the different treatments of Finn's death in the modern narratives are discussed. It is shown that a small number of the motifs and events treated in the medieval accounts of Finn’s death and in 'The Chase' are also treated in the modern tales of his demise, thus indicating some thematic continuity between medieval and modern approaches to relating how Finn died. With this in mind, some further relationships between the modern accounts of Finn's death and other medieval and modern Fenian literature are explored.

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Metzele, Josef. "The presentation of death in L. N. Tolstoy's prose." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/9731.

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This study treats in detail one of the significant themes of world literature in the narratives of the Russian writer L. N. Tolstoy. The theme of death, its modalities, motifs and related aspects, occur frequently in all of Tolstoy's artistic and philosophical writings. He presents this theme in connection with other dominant themes such as appearance and reality, falsity and truth, the attempts and failures to materialize individuals' objectives, all in various contexts of life--both private and public, and especially military life. The selection of themes such as sexuality, violence, or the transgression of moral laws, also affects the presentation of the theme of death. Instead of focusing on one pair of dominant semantic fields, Tolstoy (in the majority of his narratives) connects several of them equally. There are very few of his works in which one semantic field dominates. In accordance with Realist poetics, Tolstoy presents the theme of death directly; references to death on an allegorical or symbolic level occur in only a few of his narratives. In his early works, Tolstoy varies not only the fundamental modalities, but also the basic modes of violent and natural death. The presentation of a theme in a narrative differs depending on the length of the narrative. In his shorter prose fiction, Tolstoy concentrates the theme of death into specific passages, while its presentation in the longer narratives is distributed throughout the texts. In presenting the various characters, his narrators reveal their philosophies of life, which are particularly apparent in the borderline situation of death and dying. Members of different social classes display, as a rule, contrasting philosophies in revealing their attitudes and reactions--a trend which is again noticeable both in Tolstoy's major prose and in his late narratives. The author's focus on introspection (although in his early prose members of the lower classes are excluded from this technique) continues to play an important role in his late work as well. The author uses typical narrative devices such as anticipation, retrospection, association and paradox in the depiction of this complex theme as he attempts to 'de-romanticize', 'de-sensationalize' and 'de-dramatize' this topic. Despite the general tendency to omit the actual moment of death, there are a few works in which the horror of violent death shocks the reader. As for artistic development in presenting this theme, Tolstoy continues to employ a basic stock of devices and techniques already manifest in his early works.

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Bainbrigge, Susan Anne. "Writing against death : the autobiographies of Simone de Beauvoir." Thesis, University of Exeter, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.388606.

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Morgan, Dawn. "The nose of death : Baroque novelistic discourse in the history of laughter." Thesis, McGill University, 1997. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=35019.

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The Nose of Death considers the common matrix of the English scientific revolution and the modern English novel through the indicator of laughter. Whereas death is the paradigmatic object of laughter in the premodern period, animate or thinking matter is the prevailing object of laughter in modernity. The change is located in texts of the English baroque period from 1607 to 1767. Baroque discourse is defined by the language developed by writers loyal to both the Christian and the Copernican world views. Contradictory allegiances required them to institute a narratorial position based on simultaneous attachment to and detachment from a single point of view. This position is the defining feature of baroque discourse, the basis of both the perspective of modem science and the animation of multiple viewpoints in the modern novel.
The Nose of Death develops Walter Benjamin's reading of baroque "muting" and "fragmentation," processes that free matter, language, and time for alternative composition. The dissertation likewise adapts M. M. Bakhtin's account of the "grotesque method," considered as the approach to language and the human body that the modern "scientific method" posits itself against. This study treats baroque novelistic discourse in forgotten texts drawn from McGill's Redpath Tracts by Thomas Tomkis, Thomas D'Urfey, Tobias Swinden, and a selection of anonymously authored pamphlets. It considers, as well, two early medical works by Robert Boyle and Walter Charleton. Analogous fragments are similarly analyzed from three canonical works: Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady (1747--48), and Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759--67).

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Harrison, Luke. "On the Genealogy of Obscenity: Naked Lunch and The Death of Obscene Literature." Oberlin College Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1403008847.

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Key, Jennifer Selina. "Death in Anglo-Saxon hagiography : approaches, attitudes, aesthetics." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6352.

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This thesis examines attitudes and approaches towards death, as well as aesthetic representations of death, in Anglo-Saxon hagiography. The thesis contributes to the discussion of the historical and intellectual contexts of hagiography and considers how saintly death-scenes are represented to form commentaries on exemplary behaviour. A comprehensive survey of death-scenes in Anglo-Saxon hagiography has been undertaken, charting typical and atypical motifs used in literary manifestations of both martyrdom and non-violent death. The clusters of literary motifs found in these texts and what their use suggests about attitudes to exemplary death is analysed in an exploration of whether Anglo-Saxon hagiography presents a consistent aesthetic of death. The thesis also considers how modern scholarly fields such as thanatology can provide fresh discourses on the attitudes to and depictions of ‘good' and ‘bad' deaths. Moreover, the thesis addresses the intersection of the hagiographic inheritance with discernibly Anglo-Saxon attitudes towards death and dying, and investigates whether or not the deaths of native Anglo-Saxon saints are presented differently compared with the deaths of universal saints. The thesis explores continuities and discontinuities in the presentations of physical and spiritual death, and assesses whether or not differences exist in the depiction of death-scenes based on an author's personal agenda, choice of terminology, approaches towards the body–soul dichotomy, or the gender of his or her subject, for example. Furthermore, the thesis investigates how hagiographic representations of death compare with portrayals in other literature of the Anglo-Saxon period, and whether any non-hagiographic paradigms provide alternative exemplars of the ‘good death'. The thesis also assesses gendered portrayals of death, the portrayal of last words in saints' lives, and the various motifs relating to the soul at the moment of death. The thesis contains a Motif Index of saintly death-scenes as Appendix I.

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Tripp, Anna. "The death of the author : Sylvia Plath and the poetry of resistance." Thesis, Cardiff University, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.245995.

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Mouw, Jack Curtis. "The tragic insight and the economy of sacrifice : Nietzsche, Dionysus, the death of God /." The Ohio State University, 1989. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1487670346874525.

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Gruber, John Charles. "The relationship of love and death : metaphor as a unifying device in the Elegies of Propertius /." The Ohio State University, 1987. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1487331541710396.

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Cameron, Peter Scott. "Approaching death in the classical tradition /." St Andrews, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/495.

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Poon, Wan-lam Elizabeth. "Death, existence and limit in the works of Maurice Blanchot /." View the Table of Contents & Abstract, 2005. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B31937433.

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Bartch, Michael Christopher. "Reinvention in the Line of Death: A Reconsideration of Geoffrey Hill's Commemorative Verse." The University of Montana, 2009. http://etd.lib.umt.edu/theses/available/etd-05292009-093331/.

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This paper considers the embodied ethics of Geoffrey Hills poetic practice. Hill stages his engagement with poetry through the idioms, images, tropes, and diction of the literary tradition. Through this pragmatic rehearsal of the language of the dead, Hills poetry projects the tradition into the present. Hill resists the ethical entrapments of appropriative poetry through his insistence upon the brute physicality of atrocity and through a rigorous (for both poet and reader) formal difficulty. Hills practice refuses to console after the models of Peter Sacks, Jahan Ramazani, or John Vickery. Instead, concerned with modernitys disconnectedness, Hills poetry returns us to the presence of the dead, to their ritual and language. Alternatively, because Hills subjects are historical atrocities, rather than natural occurrences, the sort of communal consolation that the elegy traditionally offered would be inappropriate to Hills concerns. These atrocities are, most frequently, instances of human violence (the Holocaust, the Battle of Towton, the Wars of the Roses, etc.) and, for this reason, they do not lend themselves to the consolations of natural cycles of death and rebirth. Since they were often committed in the name of religion, Christian transcendence is similarly questionable, as are other consolatory transcendences. These conventional modes of consolation being denied, Hills poetry reconnects us with the dead through the formal devices and techniques of the historical institution of poetry. Through the rigorous engagement with and sacrificial making of poetry, Hill attempts to redeem tradition and history for the present.

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Livermore, Christian. "Revenants from the Church to literature." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/7914.

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Factual accounts of revenants – the risen dead – seized the medieval imagination in the early eleventh century, and were recorded by serious historians and ecclesiastics as true. They then began to appear in secular imaginative literature and art, growing progressively more elaborate and frightening throughout the Middle Ages whilst retaining many of the religious overtones expressed overtly in the ecclesiastic tales. By the early modern and modern period, the tales were removed from any overt religious context and were told as purely imaginative literature. The academic half of this thesis explores the influence on the tales of the Christian doctrine of resurrection and the cult of the body of Christ and of the saints, then traces the migration of those tales into imaginative literature from the Middle Ages to the present. It identifies key motifs from the medieval chronicles and imaginative literature that continue to appear in modern stories, and explores the extent to which Christian eschatology altered perceptions of the dead and why, in an increasingly secular context, fascination with such tales continued into modern literature, what part fear of death played throughout this period, and how that fear was expressed, first in an ecclesiastical context, then in imaginative literature through horror stories. The creative half of my thesis is a literary fiction novel updating a medieval revenant tale, the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead, to twenty-first century New England.

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Fortkamp, Aaron M. "The Little Death Artist." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1318025921.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Death in literature'

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