By coincidence, I do have some notes lying around on images of death in the Western canon. You might want to look into Swinburne’s “The Triumph of Time”, the Helen Burns character in “Jane Eyre”, the eponymous “Lady of the Camellias”, or about half the people Dickens kills off. There’s “The Little Match Girl” if you’re looking for something a little more well-known, or Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death...”. And quite a lot’s been written on the various stuff in the memento mori clade. Not sure how much of that is pro-death as such, but most of it does romanticize death to some extent.
My internally cached references are more along the lines of Poe’s “Ligeia”, but I wouldn’t call that a good reflection of the normative approach to death by any means.
By coincidence, I do have some notes lying around on images of death in the Western canon. You might want to look into Swinburne’s “The Triumph of Time”, the Helen Burns character in “Jane Eyre”, the eponymous “Lady of the Camellias”, or about half the people Dickens kills off. There’s “The Little Match Girl” if you’re looking for something a little more well-known, or Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death...”. And quite a lot’s been written on the various stuff in the memento mori clade. Not sure how much of that is pro-death as such, but most of it does romanticize death to some extent.
My internally cached references are more along the lines of Poe’s “Ligeia”, but I wouldn’t call that a good reflection of the normative approach to death by any means.
Thank you!