12 Years a Slave narrates Solomon Northup's kidnapping from freedom into slavery and his eventual restoration to his family. Northup is a literate, skilled violinist and laborer living as a free Black man in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Medical tag
Death Dying
Deathbeds, the experience of dying, the good death, palliation, euthanasia.
Works
A Christmas Carol. In Prose.
The title play, A Doll's House (1879), takes place over three days of Christmas in the comfortable Norwegian home of Torvald Helmer, a newly appointed bank manager, and his wife Nora, whom he treats as a charming pet, calling her his songbird and squirrel. Years earlier, when Torvald was gravely ill and doctors advised a year in Italy, Nora secretly borrowed the money from the lawyer Krogstad, forging her dying father's signature as guarantor.
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories gathers Flannery O'Connor's early fiction around Southern households where manners, piety, resentment, and violence collide. In the title story, a grandmother's nostalgia and manipulations help divert a family trip toward the Misfit, whose murders expose both her shallow goodness and her final reach toward kinship.
Beowulf remembers a northern heroic world through three combats that join glory to mortality. Hrothgar's hall Heorot, built as a center of gift-giving and song, becomes a place of terror when Grendel attacks the sleeping retainers.
This collection pairs Melville's posthumous novella Billy Budd, Sailor with the best of the short fiction he published in magazines in the 1850s, usually including Bartleby, the Scrivener, Benito Cereno and The Encantadas (contents vary by edition). Bartleby (1853) is narrated by a comfortable Wall Street lawyer who hires a pale, quiet copyist.
BUtterfield 8, named for a fashionable Manhattan telephone exchange, is set in New York in 1931, in the last years of Prohibition and the early Depression, among speakeasies, apartment hotels and the blurred borderland between respectable society and its demimonde. Its central figure is Gloria Wandrous, a beautiful, intelligent young woman who drinks heavily, sleeps with men who interest her and lives partly on their generosity, while refusing to see herself as a kept woman or a prostitute.
Candide, ou l'Optimisme follows a guileless young man raised in the castle of the Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh in Westphalia, where the tutor Pangloss teaches that this is the best of all possible worlds and that everything is for the best. Candide is kicked out of the castle for kissing the Baron's daughter Cunégonde behind a screen, and the rest of the tale tests Pangloss's doctrine against an avalanche of catastrophe.
Cannery Row is a loosely plotted, affectionate portrait of the sardine-cannery district of Monterey, California, during the Depression, built from short narrative chapters alternating with self-contained vignettes or 'inter-chapters'. Its centre is Doc, a gentle, learned marine biologist who runs the Western Biological Laboratory, collects specimens from the tide pools, listens to Gregorian chant and Bach, reads poetry, and is trusted by everyone on the Row.
City of God is Augustine’s monumental argument that Rome’s disaster does not discredit Christianity and that human history must be understood through two loves. The immediate occasion is the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410, after which critics blamed Christians for weakening the old gods.
The Confessions is a prayer in thirteen books addressed to God, in which Augustine recounts his life up to his mother's death and then turns to philosophical reflection on memory, time and the creation narrative of Genesis. Books I to IX are autobiographical.
Daisy Miller: A Study is told in close third person through Frederick Winterbourne, a young American who has lived most of his life in Geneva and has grown, in his aunt's phrase, too used to European ways. At a hotel in Vevey on Lake Geneva he meets Annie 'Daisy' Miller, a pretty, rich and uninhibited girl from Schenectady, New York, travelling with her vague, dyspeptic mother and her brash little brother Randolph, accompanied by a courier, Eugenio, whom they treat almost as a member of the family.
David Copperfield is the first-person autobiography of a novelist looking back on his life. David is born at Blunderstone in Suffolk six months after his father's death, on a night when his formidable great-aunt Betsey Trotwood storms out on learning he is not a girl.
Death Comes for the Archbishop follows Jean Marie Latour and Joseph Vaillant, French missionary priests sent to the newly annexed American Southwest to organize the Catholic Church in New Mexico. Cather shapes the novel less as a conventional plot than as a sequence of remembered journeys, encounters, hardships, and acts of pastoral administration.
Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem covers the last twenty-four hours or so of Willy Loman, a sixty-three-year-old travelling salesman, interwoven with his memories and imaginings of the past. Willy returns early to his small Brooklyn house, now hemmed in by apartment buildings, because he can no longer keep the car on the road: his mind keeps drifting.
Modelled on Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, Hume's Dialogues are narrated by Pamphilus, a young man, to his friend Hermippus, and report a conversation at the house of Pamphilus's tutor, Cleanthes. Three speakers debate not whether God exists, which all profess to accept, but what can be known of God's nature by reason.
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha was published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. An impoverished hidalgo of about fifty, Alonso Quixano, reads chivalric romances until, from too little sleep and too much reading, his brain dries up and he loses his wits.
Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers gathers short texts from Christianity’s formative generations after the apostles. The collection usually includes 1 Clement, the letters of Ignatius, Polycarp’s letter, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, 2 Clement and fragments such as Papias or the Epistle to Diognetus, depending on edition.
Francis of Assisi reaches modern popular culture through birds, wolves, poverty, brown robes, garden statues, animal blessings, Christmas cribs, and an almost ecological tenderness. The early sources are more demanding.
East of Eden is a multigenerational saga set mainly in the Salinas Valley of California from the Civil War to the First World War, which retells the story of Cain and Abel through two families: the Trasks and the Hamiltons, the latter being the narrator's own maternal ancestors. Samuel Hamilton, a poor, inventive, generous Irish immigrant farmer and blacksmith, raises a large family on barren land.
Effi Briest opens at Hohen-Cremmen, the Brandenburg estate of the Briest family, where seventeen-year-old Effi, playful and still half a child, is suddenly engaged to Baron Geert von Innstetten, a thirty-eight-year-old district administrator who long ago courted her mother. Effi accepts, partly from ambition and partly from a wish for excitement, and the couple marry and move to Kessin, a small Baltic resort town in Pomerania.
Montaigne called his pieces essais, 'trials' or 'attempts', and the word names both a method and a new literary genre. The book gathers 107 chapters in three books, ranging from one-page notes on thumbs, smells and names to the sprawling 'Apology for Raymond Sebond', which fills a sixth of the whole.
Bacon's Essays, or Counsels, Civil and Moral, grew over almost thirty years from a slim volume of ten pieces in 1597 to fifty-eight in the final edition of 1625, the text used here. Bacon borrowed the name essay from Montaigne, but where Montaigne explored himself at leisure, Bacon compressed observation into dense, balanced sentences meant for men of business and government.
Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order is set out like Euclid: definitions, axioms, numbered propositions, proofs, corollaries and the discursive notes (scholia) where Spinoza speaks most freely. Its five parts lead from God to human blessedness.
Evangelium Vitae is John Paul II's 1995 encyclical on the dignity and inviolability of human life. It opens with biblical meditation, especially the story of Cain and Abel, and then develops a moral analysis of what the pope calls threats to life in modern law, medicine, family life, and political culture.
Fathers and Sons is set in the Russian countryside in the spring and summer of 1859, two years before the emancipation of the serfs. Arkady Kirsanov, a newly graduated student, returns to his father's modest, poorly run estate, Maryino, bringing his friend and mentor Yevgeny Bazarov, a brusque, brilliant medical student of humble origins who calls himself a nihilist: he accepts no principle on authority and values only what is useful, especially natural science.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a frame narrative told through the letters of Robert Walton, an English explorer whose ship is trapped in Arctic ice. Walton rescues a dying stranger, Victor Frankenstein, who has been pursuing a gigantic figure across the frozen sea, and who tells his story as a warning to a man whose ambition resembles his own.
Heart of Darkness is told by an unnamed narrator aboard the yawl Nellie, anchored in the Thames estuary at dusk, who reports a story told by his companion, the seaman Charles Marlow. Marlow begins by observing that the Thames, too, was once one of the dark places of the earth when the Romans came.
Augustine's Homilies on the Gospel of John are pastoral expositions of one of Christianity's most theologically dense texts. Preached to a congregation rather than composed as a detached treatise, they move through John's prologue, signs, discourses, passion narrative, resurrection appearances, and final scenes with Peter and the beloved disciple.
Humboldt's Gift is narrated by Charlie Citrine, a successful middle-aged Chicago writer who has won a Pulitzer Prize and made a fortune from a Broadway hit about the eighteenth-century adventurer Baron von Trenck, which was also made into a film. Now in his fifties, Charlie is distracted, spiritually restless and steadily losing his money.
Jewish Antiquities is Josephus' twenty-book retelling of Jewish history from creation to the outbreak of revolt against Rome in 66 CE. It is not simply a paraphrase of the Bible, though its first half follows Genesis through the monarchy, exile and restoration.
Kokoro, a word meaning heart, mind or the core of things, is in three parts. In the first, 'Sensei and I', a young university student in Tokyo meets an older man at the seaside resort of Kamakura and is drawn to him, calling him Sensei, 'teacher'.
Letters and Papers from Prison was assembled after the war by Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer's closest friend, former student and nephew by marriage, and published in 1951 as Widerstand und Ergebung ('Resistance and Submission'). It gathers what Bonhoeffer wrote during two years of imprisonment by the Nazi state, together with the essay 'After Ten Years', composed at Christmas 1942 as a stocktaking for fellow conspirators.
Letters from a Stoic selects from Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius, a sequence of philosophical letters that turn daily life into training for freedom. Seneca writes as an older adviser to a younger friend, but the letters are also exercises for himself.
Napoleon dictated or wrote tens of thousands of letters, often several dozen a day, to generals, ministers, prefects, bishops, kings, his family and the women he loved. Napoleon III's government published a thirty-two-volume Correspondance de Napoléon Ier between 1858 and 1870, pruning letters that embarrassed the dynasty; the Fondation Napoléon's complete edition, begun in 2004, runs to more than forty thousand items.
Sulpitius Severus's Life of St. Martin made Martin of Tours one of the defining saints of the Latin West.
Little Women follows the four March sisters growing up in a New England town during and after the American Civil War, while their father serves as an army chaplain. Meg, the eldest, is pretty and longs for fine things; Jo, a tomboyish aspiring writer with a quick temper, is the heart of the book; Beth is shy, gentle and musical; and Amy, the youngest, is artistic and vain.
Mansfield Park follows Fanny Price, the timid daughter of a poor, overburdened family in Portsmouth, who at ten is taken in by her wealthy aunt and uncle, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, at Mansfield Park in Northamptonshire. Her other aunt, the officious and mean Mrs Norris, never lets her forget her dependent status, and her cousins Tom, Maria and Julia treat her with indifference.
The Meditations, which Marcus Aurelius may have titled simply 'To Himself', is a private notebook of philosophical reflections written in Greek, probably during his military campaigns on the Danube in the 170s CE. It was not intended for publication and consists of twelve books of entries ranging from single sentences to short essays, often repeated and varied as exercises to fix principles in the mind.
Sherman's Memoirs, published in two volumes in 1875 and revised in 1886, present themselves less as history than as testimony; in the preface to the second edition he says he writes as a witness before the tribunal of history, supplying material for some future historian. The first volume, the text stored in this library, runs from his Ohio boyhood to the Meridian campaign of February 1864.
Of Mice and Men takes place over a few days on a ranch near Soledad in California's Salinas Valley during the Depression. George Milton, small and sharp, and Lennie Small, a huge, immensely strong man with an intellectual disability and the mind of a child, are itinerant ranch hands who travel together, unusual among solitary migrant workers.
This small volume presents Montaigne's celebrated essay on friendship together with other essays from the Essais in M. A.
On the Making of Man is Gregory of Nyssa's theological anthropology, written as an extended reflection on Genesis and the claim that human beings are made in the image of God. Gregory combines scriptural exegesis, Platonizing philosophy, and late antique physiology to ask why humanity is embodied, rational, sexual, mortal, and capable of divine likeness.
On the Nature of the Universe, better known as De Rerum Natura, is a philosophical poem that tries to cure fear by explaining the world. Lucretius addresses Memmius and invokes Venus, then argues that religion has driven human beings to cruelty, as in the sacrifice of Iphigenia.
On War (Vom Kriege) is an unfinished philosophical inquiry into the nature of war, written by a Prussian staff officer who had lived through the Napoleonic transformation of warfare. It is organised in eight books, but Clausewitz left a note in 1827 saying that only the first chapter of Book I satisfied him, and he was revising the whole when he died.
Our Town presents Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, through three acts named Daily Life, Love and Marriage, and Death and Eternity. The Stage Manager introduces streets, families, dates, statistics, church steeples, milk deliveries, schoolbooks, and weather with almost no scenery, making the ordinary visible by stripping theater to gesture, voice, and memory.
Passing is a short novel in three parts, told in close third person through the consciousness of Irene Redfield, a light-skinned Black woman married to a Harlem physician. It opens with a letter that stirs Irene's memory of an encounter two years earlier.
The Pensées ('Thoughts') are the fragments of an unfinished apology for the Christian religion, found after Pascal's death in 1662 as nearly a thousand notes, many on slips of paper threaded together in bundles. Pascal had planned a work that would first unsettle the complacent unbeliever (the honnête homme of polite society) by showing the misery and contradiction of the human condition, then show that Christianity alone explains that condition and offers its remedy.
The Personal Memoirs of U. S.
Ruth is Gaskell's novel about a 'fallen woman', written to challenge the Victorian assumption that an unmarried mother and her child were beyond redemption. Ruth Hilton is a beautiful, innocent orphan of fifteen, apprenticed to a dressmaker, Mrs Mason, in a country town, where she works long hours in a cold workroom.
Sense and Sensibility follows two sisters whose temperaments represent the opposed values of its title. When Henry Dashwood dies, Norland Park in Sussex passes to John, his son by a first marriage, who promises to provide for his stepmother and half-sisters but is talked out of any real generosity by his grasping wife Fanny.
Donne's Sermons and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions bring the metaphysical imagination into pulpit and sickroom. The sermons, including Death's Duel, display a preacher fascinated by mortality, judgment, resurrection, the body, and the unstable boundary between private self and Christian community.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom is Lawrence's account of his two years with the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, from his first visit to the Hejaz in October 1916 to the entry into Damascus in October 1918. It opens with an introductory chapter that admits the book's political bad conscience: Lawrence knew that Britain and France had already divided the Arab lands in the Sykes–Picot agreement while he encouraged the Arabs to fight for independence.
Siddhartha is a short, lyrical novel set in India in the time of the Buddha, following the spiritual journey of a young man who seeks enlightenment through experience rather than doctrine. Siddhartha is the handsome, gifted son of a Brahmin, admired by all and loved by his friend Govinda.
Sixty Stories is Donald Barthelme's own selection of his short fiction from roughly two decades, drawn from collections such as Come Back, Dr. Caligari, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, City Life, Sadness, Amateurs and Great Days, together with some previously uncollected pieces.
St. Thomas Becket and the Canterbury Miracles traces a murder into a medical archive.
Sts. Cosmas and Damian are the physician saints par excellence: twin or paired martyrs, healers without payment, patrons of doctors and surgeons, and subjects of one of medieval art's strangest surgical miracles.
Sts. Roch and Sebastian became plague saints through two different imaginative routes.
Testament of Youth is Vera Brittain's memoir of the years 1900 to 1925, centred on the First World War, written to show what the war meant to a generation of women. It begins with her provincial girlhood in Buxton, where she chafes against the expectations placed on a middle-class daughter, educates herself, and fights to be allowed to sit the entrance examination for Oxford.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a comic and nostalgic novel of boyhood set in the 1840s in St. Petersburg, a small Missouri town on the Mississippi modelled on Twain's Hannibal.
The Aeneid tells how Aeneas, a Trojan survivor, travels from ruined Troy to Italy to found the lineage that will become Rome. The poem opens with storm and displacement: Juno hates the Trojans, Aeolus releases winds, and Aeneas reaches Carthage.
The Age of Alexander is a collection of nine of Plutarch's Lives covering the Greek world in the fourth and early third centuries BCE, from the decline of Sparta and Thebes through the rise of Macedon and the conquests of Alexander to the struggles of his successors. Removed from their original Roman pairings, they read as a sequence of Greek history told through character.
This volume contains Tacitus' two earliest works, both written in 98 CE, soon after the assassination of the emperor Domitian. The Agricola is a biography and eulogy of the author's father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, who died in 93.
The Annals of Imperial Rome narrates the Julio-Claudian empire from the death of Augustus through Tiberius, Claudius and Nero, though parts are lost. Tacitus writes history as the psychology of autocracy.
The Arthashastra, the 'science of material gain' or of statecraft, is a vast Sanskrit treatise on how a king should acquire, protect and govern territory. Written mostly in prose with occasional verses, it is divided into fifteen books and some 150 chapters, and covers almost every aspect of administration with remarkable detail and an unsentimental realism that has led to comparisons with Machiavelli.
The Bacchae and Other Plays presents Euripides at his most dangerous: gods are real, but that does not make them gentle. The Bacchae begins when Dionysus arrives at Thebes in disguise to punish the royal house for denying his divinity and slandering his mother Semele.
The Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue of seven hundred verses in eighteen chapters, forming part of the sixth book of the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic of the war between two branches of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. It is set on the battlefield of Kurukshetra at the moment before battle begins.
The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, published in 1872 when Nietzsche was a twenty-seven-year-old professor at Basel, argues that Greek tragedy arose from the union of two opposed artistic drives, which he names after the gods Apollo and Dionysus. The Apollonian is the drive toward clear form, measure and individuation, whose physiological analogue is the dream, in which every person is a perfect artist of images.
Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Civili, in three books, narrate the first two years of the war he fought against Pompey and the senatorial party, from January 49 BCE to the beginning of the Alexandrian war in late 48. The work is unfinished, breaking off in Alexandria, and it is the most openly political of his writings: its constant task is to show that Caesar was forced into war by a faction of personal enemies, that he repeatedly sought peace, and that he treated defeated fellow citizens with a mercy his opponents never showed.
The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman gathers the evolving work of a poet who made the self expansive enough to contain a democracy. The center is Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and revised across multiple editions until Whitman's death.
The Conquest of Gaul is a common English title for Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, seven books narrating his campaigns of 58 to 52 BCE, completed by an eighth book written after his death by his officer Aulus Hirtius. Each book covers one campaigning year, and Caesar speaks of himself throughout in the third person, a device that makes political self-advertisement read like a dispatch.
The Consolation of Philosophy is a prison dialogue between the condemned Boethius and Lady Philosophy, who appears at his bedside when he is sick with grief and self-pity. The work alternates prose and metre.
Published in Munich in 1937 under the one-word title Nachfolge (following, or discipleship), The Cost of Discipleship is Bonhoeffer's attempt to recover the plain command of Jesus to follow him from a Lutheran church that had, he believed, turned grace into a doctrine requiring nothing. Its first chapter sets the terms for the whole book with the contrast between cheap and costly grace.
The Count of Monte Cristo is a vast novel of injustice and revenge. In 1815 Edmond Dantès, a young sailor of Marseilles, returns from a voyage on which he carried a letter from Napoleon's island of Elba as a dying captain requested.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich begins at the end. In the law courts, colleagues of Ivan Ilyich Golovin read in the newspaper of his death, and each thinks first of the promotions and transfers it will bring.
The Divine Comedy begins with Dante lost in a dark wood midway through life, unable to climb the sunlit hill because beasts block his way. Virgil comes as guide and leads him through Inferno, where punishments reveal the inner logic of disordered love, violence, fraud, and treachery.
The Early Christian Creeds gathers short doctrinal texts that became durable summaries of Christian identity: baptismal symbols, conciliar formulas and later Western confessions. The Old Roman Symbol and the Apostles' Creed preserve the shape of early baptismal confession: belief in God the Father, Jesus Christ his Son, the Spirit, the church, forgiveness, resurrection and life.
The Fall of the Roman Republic is a selection of six of Plutarch's Roman Lives, arranged to tell the story of the Republic's collapse in the century before Augustus: Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar and Cicero. Read in sequence, they show how military glory, personal ambition and civil war destroyed Rome's traditional government.
This entry gathers the Golden Legend chapters and adjacent medieval traditions behind saints whose images still move through calendars, holidays, icons, hospitals, medals, advertising, and folklore. Jacobus de Voragine did not write critical biography in the modern sense.
The Histories is the first great work of prose history in the Western tradition, an inquiry (historia) into the causes and course of the wars between the Greeks and the Persian Empire. Herodotus states his purpose in the opening: to preserve the memory of great and marvellous deeds of Greeks and barbarians, and especially the reason why they fought one another.
The History of the Church tells the story of Christianity from the apostles to Eusebius’ own fourth-century world, where persecution gives way to imperial favor. Eusebius organizes the past through succession: bishops, teachers, heresies, writings, persecutions and martyrs.
The History of the Peloponnesian War is Thucydides’ unfinished account of the war between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 411 BCE. Unlike Herodotus’ broad storytelling, Thucydides narrows his gaze to power, fear, interest, decision and the deterioration of civic language under pressure.
The Iliad tells of a few weeks in the tenth year of the Greek siege of Troy, and its subject, announced in the first line, is the wrath of Achilles. A plague sent by Apollo ravages the Greek camp because Agamemnon, commander of the Achaeans, has refused to return the captive daughter of Apollo's priest Chryses.
The Jewish War is Josephus' account of the revolt against Rome from its Hasmonean and Herodian prehistory to the destruction of Jerusalem and the last pockets of resistance. Written after Josephus had defected to the Romans, the work tries to explain a catastrophe to several audiences at once: Jews who had survived it, Romans who had conquered, and Greek-speaking readers who needed Judean politics translated into the language of civil war, faction and providence.
The Koran, or Quran ('recitation'), is the central scripture of Islam. It consists of 114 chapters called suras, of very unequal length, each made up of verses (ayat).
The Lais of Marie de France are twelve short narrative poems in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, preserved together in one manuscript (British Library, Harley 978) with a general prologue in which Marie dedicates them to a 'noble king', probably Henry II. She says she has heard Breton lais, songs commemorating adventures, and has put them into verse so they will not be forgotten.
The Last Days of Socrates gathers four dialogues by Plato that together tell the story of Socrates' trial and death in Athens in 399 BCE: the Euthyphro, the Apology, the Crito and the Phaedo. In the Euthyphro, Socrates meets Euthyphro outside the court where Socrates must answer an indictment for impiety and corrupting the young.
The Master and Margarita interweaves two stories: the visit of the Devil to Soviet Moscow in the 1930s and a novel about Pontius Pilate written by an unnamed author known as the Master. On a hot spring evening at Patriarch's Ponds, the literary bureaucrat Mikhail Berlioz and the young poet Ivan Bezdomny are discussing the non-existence of Jesus when a mysterious foreigner joins them.
The Meek One (Krotkaya), also translated as A Gentle Creature, is a long short story that Dostoyevsky published in his one-man journal A Writer's Diary in November 1876, prompted by newspaper reports of suicides, including that of a young seamstress who leapt from a window holding an icon. In a short preface Dostoyevsky calls it a 'fantastic' story, explaining that it is realistic in every respect except its form: it imagines the inner monologue of a man as though a stenographer could record his chaotic thoughts.
The Metaphysical Poets is Helen Gardner's anthology of English poets of the seventeenth century who wrote in the style that Samuel Johnson, borrowing a phrase from Dryden, called 'metaphysical'. Johnson complained that in their verse the most heterogeneous ideas were yoked by violence together; T.
The Misanthrope and Other Plays collects several of Molière's comedies; the edition translated by John Wood and David Coward includes The Misanthrope, The Sicilian, Tartuffe, A Doctor in Spite of Himself and The Imaginary Invalid. Together they show the range of Molière's art, from the verse comedy of character to farce, and his satire of hypocrisy, pretension and medicine.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket begins as a sea adventure told by a young Nantucketer whose craving for forbidden experience repeatedly overrides judgment. Pym and his friend Augustus Barnard first make a disastrous drunken voyage in the Ariel, a small boat nearly destroyed before rescue.
The Nibelungenlied is a medieval German epic of courtship, deception, insult and catastrophic revenge. Its first half centers on Siegfried, prince of Xanten, who comes to Worms hoping to win Kriemhild, sister of the Burgundian kings Gunther, Gernot and Giselher.
The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus's long return from Troy to Ithaca and of the household that must survive his absence. The poem opens not with Odysseus but with disorder: his son Telemachus is growing up under the pressure of suitors who consume the estate and demand that Penelope choose a new husband.
The Oresteia follows the House of Atreus from inherited blood guilt to the foundation of civic justice. Agamemnon opens at Argos, where a watchman sees the beacon announcing Troy’s fall.
The Persian Expedition, known in Greek as the Anabasis or 'march up-country', is Xenophon's account of the campaign of 401–399 BCE in which about ten thousand Greek mercenaries followed Cyrus the Younger into Mesopotamia and then fought their way home. Cyrus, younger son of Darius II, gathers an army in Sardis on the pretext of a war against Pisidian raiders, while his real aim is to unseat his brother, King Artaxerxes II.
The Portrait of a Lady follows Isabel Archer, a young American woman brought to Europe by her aunt, Mrs. Touchett, and admired for her intelligence, independence and hunger for experience.
The Power and the Glory is set in an unnamed Mexican state during an anticlerical campaign that has outlawed or driven out Catholic priests. Its central figure is the last active priest in the region, a fugitive known as the whisky priest because of his alcoholism and moral failures.
The Quiet American is narrated by Thomas Fowler, a weary British journalist in French-controlled Vietnam during the First Indochina War. The novel begins after the death of Alden Pyle, a young American official whose innocence, confidence and political theories have made him dangerous.
The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan is the young Winston Churchill's history of the Anglo-Egyptian campaigns of 1896–1899 that destroyed the Mahdist state in the Sudan. Churchill begins with geography and the Nile, which he presents as the thread on which the whole story hangs, and then with the rebellion of Muhammad Ahmad, a Dongolawi boat-builder's son and Sufi ascetic who proclaimed himself the Mahdi in 1881.
The Scarlet Letter is set in seventeenth-century Puritan Boston but begins with a nineteenth-century frame, The Custom-House, in which a narrator claims to discover an embroidered letter A and the story of Hester Prynne. Hester appears on the scaffold with her infant Pearl, condemned to wear the scarlet letter for adultery while refusing to name the child's father.
The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening was published in Copenhagen on 30 July 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, with Kierkegaard named as editor. ' The introduction argues that for the Christian even death is not the sickness unto death, since there is hope beyond it; the true sickness unto death is despair, a condition in which one cannot die and cannot live, a perpetual dying without end.
Of the Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right is a compact treatise in four books, the only finished part of a larger work on political institutions that Rousseau abandoned. It opens with its most famous sentence, that man is born free and everywhere in chains, and with a promise not to explain how this happened but to say what could make it legitimate.
The Song of Roland transforms a historical rearguard action in Charlemagne's Spanish campaign into a sacred and feudal epic of loyalty, betrayal, martyrdom, and judgment. The plot turns on Ganelon's resentment.
The Theban Plays collects Sophocles’ tragedies about Oedipus and his children: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. They were not written as a trilogy, but together they form the most influential family disaster in Western drama.
This volume pairs two of Henry James's most intense short fictions about possession, interpretation and moral trespass. The Turn of the Screw is framed as a manuscript read aloud during a country-house gathering.
The Twelve Caesars offers biographies of Julius Caesar and the first eleven Roman emperors from Augustus through Domitian. Suetonius does not write history as Tacitus does, with sustained analysis of institutions and causation.
The Underdogs follows Demetrio Macias, a peasant from Juchipila who joins the Mexican Revolution after conflict with federal soldiers makes ordinary life impossible. At first Demetrio's rebellion is local and personal: he flees with a band of men into the hills, fights effectively and becomes a leader because of courage, terrain knowledge and charisma.
The Vampyre is a brief but enormously influential Gothic tale that turns the vampire from folkloric corpse into a fashionable aristocratic predator. Aubrey, a young gentleman of imagination and moral seriousness, enters London society and becomes fascinated by Lord Ruthven, a mysterious nobleman whose charm is inseparable from coldness.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None is a philosophical prose-poem in four parts, written in the cadences of Luther's Bible. Its hero borrows the name of the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster, whom Nietzsche chose because the first moralist should be the one to overturn morality.
Treasure Island is narrated mainly by Jim Hawkins, the son of an innkeeper whose ordinary life is transformed when the old pirate Billy Bones comes to the Admiral Benbow inn. Bones brings a sea chest, a map and danger in the form of former shipmates, including Black Dog and the blind beggar Pew.
Troilus and Criseyde retells a story from the Trojan War tradition, but its real subject is erotic psychology under the pressure of fortune, language and time. Troilus, a Trojan prince and son of Priam, initially mocks lovers until he sees Criseyde in the temple and is struck by desire.
Twelve Angry Men takes place almost entirely in a jury room after a murder trial. Twelve male jurors must decide whether a young defendant is guilty of killing his father; a guilty verdict will mean death.
Two Lives of Charlemagne pairs Einhard's Life of Charlemagne with Notker the Stammerer's later anecdotes about the emperor. Einhard writes as a court insider shaped by classical biography, especially Suetonius.
Utilitarianism is a short defence of the ethical theory Mill inherited from Jeremy Bentham and his own father. It was first published in three instalments of Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and as a book in 1863.
Wuthering Heights is a violent family romance told through layered narration. Mr.
Passages
- 12 Years a Slave, Tibeats episode
Northup is nearly hanged and left in prolonged bodily torment after resisting Tibeats.
- A Christmas Carol, Stave IV
An unattended corpse stripped of its bed-curtains and shirt; the Cratchits mourn Tiny Tim.
- A Doll's House and Other Plays, A Doll's House, Act 2
Dr Rank speaks of the inherited disease destroying his spine and of the final examination he is making on himself.
- A Doll's House and Other Plays, A Doll's House, Act 3
Rank leaves his visiting card marked with a black cross to announce his approaching death.
- A Doll's House and Other Plays, Ghosts, Act 3
Osvald's mental collapse at sunrise; his mother stands with the morphine he made her promise to give him.
- A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, Grace without softness
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens includes disability, chronic illness, trauma, violence, family care, and the charged symbolism of bodily affliction
- Beowulf, The dragon and the barrow
Beowulf gives this tag concrete force through the medical interest lies in battle wounds, grief, aging kingship, and the social care owed to bodies that have been broken in public violence
- Billy Budd and Other Stories, Bartleby, middle and end
Bartleby's escalating refusals, his living in the office, removal to the Tombs, refusal to eat and death against the prison wall.
- Billy Budd and Other Stories, Billy Budd, after the execution
The purser and the surgeon debate why Billy's body showed no spasm at hanging.
- BUtterfield 8, Final chapters
Gloria's fall from the steamboat and the public reaction to her death.
- Candide: Or Optimism, Ch. 5–6
The Lisbon earthquake, the injured Candide, and the auto-da-fé held to prevent further quakes.
- Cannery Row, La Jolla chapter
Doc finds the body of a drowned girl in the rocks while collecting specimens.
- City of God, Books 13–14
Death, flesh, will and disordered desire are traced to the fall.
- City of God, Book 22
Resurrection raises questions of bodily restoration, wounds, disabilities and identity.
- Confessions, Book IV.4–9
Grief at the death of a friend: weeping, hatred of familiar places, weariness of life and fear of death.
- Confessions, Book IX.10–13
Monica's fever and death at Ostia and Augustine's struggle to restrain his tears.
- Daisy Miller, Part II (closing pages)
Daisy's illness, the doctor's attendance, her death and burial in the Protestant cemetery.
- David Copperfield, Ch. 9
David learns of his mother's death and that of her newborn baby.
- David Copperfield, Ch. 48–53
Dora's illness and death, and David's grief.
- Death Comes for the Archbishop, Memory and death
Death Comes for the Archbishop gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens includes travel hardship, hunger, fever, aging, deathbed care, and the bodily cost of missionary life in an arid landscape
- Death of a Salesman, Act Two, final scenes and Requiem
Willy plans his death for the insurance; the funeral and Linda's inability to cry.
- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 10
Philo on why the miserable remain alive: terrified, not bribed, to continue existing; the man of delicate temper as more sensitive and therefore more unhappy.
- Don Quixote, Part II, Ch. 74
Don Quixote falls into a fever, sleeps, wakes sane, renounces chivalry and dies.
- Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers, Ignatius, Letter to the Romans
Ignatius frames his coming death in bodily and sacrificial language.
- Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers, Martyrdom of Polycarp
Polycarp’s death is narrated as witness, endurance and communal memory.
- Early Franciscan Sources, Canticle of the Sun
Praise of bodily death gives end-of-life suffering a devotional vocabulary.
- Early Franciscan Sources, Death narratives
Francis's final weakness, song, and ritual gestures make dying a communal and liturgical event.
- East of Eden, Part Four (final chapters)
News of Aron's death in France; Adam's stroke and deathbed blessing.
- Effi Briest, Final chapters (c. Ch. 33–36)
Effi's decline after Annie's visit, Rummschüttel's letter to her parents, and her death at Hohen-Cremmen.
- Essays, Book I, Ch. XIX (Cotton), 'That to study philosophy is to learn to die'
Stoic and Epicurean arguments for habitual meditation on death as a cure for fear of it.
- Essays, Book III, Ch. XII, 'Of Physiognomy'
Montaigne and his household flee plague and civil war; he admires how ordinary people meet death without philosophy.
- Essays, Essay II, Of Death
Fear of death compared to children's fear of the dark; the deathbed's groans and convulsions; passions that overcome the fear of dying; death as natural as birth.
- Ethics, Part IV, Prop. XXXIX, Note
Death defined as a change in the body's proportion of motion and rest; the Spanish poet who after illness forgot his own works.
- Evangelium Vitae, Gospel and dignity
Evangelium Vitae gives this tag concrete force through this is one of the batch's most explicit medical-ethics texts, addressing abortion, euthanasia, suffering, conscience, and care for the vulnerable
- Fathers and Sons, Ch. 27
Bazarov cuts himself during a post-mortem on a typhus victim; he describes his symptoms clinically, accepts his death and sends for Odintsova.
- Frankenstein, Vol. I, Ch. I–II (1818) / Ch. 2–3 (1831)
Victor's youthful reading of Agrippa, Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus; his mother dies of scarlet fever caught while nursing Elizabeth.
- Heart of Darkness, Part I (Outer Station)
The grove of death where sick, starving African labourers lie dying in the shade.
- Heart of Darkness, Part II (the attack)
The helmsman is speared and dies on the deck, his blood filling Marlow's shoes.
- Heart of Darkness, Part III
Kurtz's emaciation and illness, his midnight crawl toward the forest, and his death.
- Homilies on the Gospel of John, Homilies on Lazarus
Death and resurrection supply Augustine with a pastoral language for grief, sin, and renewed life.
- Humboldt's Gift, Middle sections
Humboldt's death alone in a Times Square hotel, and Charlie's memory of avoiding him shortly before.
- Humboldt's Gift, Final section
Reburial of Humboldt and his mother.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 7, famine traditions
Famine in biblical history is treated as social crisis and divine judgment, linking hunger, public order and survival.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 15, Herodian family violence
Herod's household murders and suspicions are narrated as political pathology, a non-clinical portrait of fear, rage and moral disorder.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 17, Herod's final illness
Herod's last disease includes severe pain, feverish decline, abdominal and genital symptoms, physicians and desperate therapies before death.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 19, Agrippa I's death
The sudden illness and death of Agrippa I are framed as divine judgment, showing how acute disease becomes political theology.
- Jewish Antiquities, Book 20, late provincial unrest
Crowding, executions, famine relief and social disorder in the later books reveal the bodily cost of unstable governance.
- Kokoro, Part Two
The father's slow decline from kidney disease, the doctor's visits and the family's vigil.
- Kokoro, Part Two
News of the Meiji emperor's death and General Nogi's suicide reaches the household.
- Letters and Papers from Prison, Letters of 30 April, 8 June and 16 July 1944
Critique of religion as a deus ex machina at the limits of human knowledge and strength, with implications for faith at the sickbed.
- Letters and Papers from Prison, 'Stations on the Way to Freedom' (after 20 July 1944) and 'By Gracious Powers' (December 1944)
Death imagined as the last station of freedom; a poem of trust written for his family at Christmas in the Gestapo prison.
- Letters from a Stoic, Letters 24 and 26
Death should be contemplated in advance so it loses its power to terrify.
- Letters from a Stoic, Letter 54
Seneca describes severe breathing attacks and his mental response to bodily crisis.
- Letters of Napoleon, Russian campaign letters and bulletins (1812)
Reports from Moscow and the retreat that understate losses to cold, hunger and disease.
- Letters of Napoleon, St Helena correspondence and will (1815–1821)
Complaints about climate and confinement, failing health, and the will's request that his body be examined after death.
- Life of St. Martin, Life, Ch. 7: fever and apparent death
The catechumen's fever and death become the first major healing miracle, blending sickroom detail with resurrection narrative.
- Little Women, Part One, Ch. 16–18
Beth nurses the poor Hummel family's sick baby, who dies of scarlet fever; Beth catches it; Amy is sent away; Dr Bangs attends.
- Little Women, Part Two, Ch. 36 and 40
Beth's slow decline at the seaside and at home; her death nursed by Jo.
- Mansfield Park, Vol. III, Ch. 17 (Ch. 48)
Dr Grant dies of apoplexy after three great institutionary dinners in one week.
- Meditations, Book 3.3; 4.48
Catalogues of the dead, including Hippocrates and physicians who frowned over the sick.
- Meditations, Book 9.3; 12.36
Death as a natural process like birth and growing old; departing serenely.
- Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. XIV (October 1863)
Willie's typhoid on the steamer Atlantic, the attending army surgeon's warning, death at the Gayoso Hotel, and Sherman's self-reproach and midnight letter.
- Of Mice and Men, Section 3
Carlson shoots Candy's old dog; Candy later wishes he had done it himself.
- Of Mice and Men, Section 6
George kills Lennie to spare him the lynch mob.
- On the Making of Man, Sex, death, and resurrection
On the Making of Man gives this tag concrete force through its medical lens includes anatomy, generation, bodily organs, sex difference, mortality, resurrection, and the porous border between medicine and theology
- On the Nature of the Universe, Book 3
Arguments for the mortality of the soul aim to cure fear of death and afterlife punishment.
- On the Nature of the Universe, Book 6, plague of Athens
The poem ends with fever, thirst, sores, despair, contagion-like care and burial breakdown.
- On War, Book V, Ch. 12, Marches (continued)
Sickness in crowded quarters versus on the road; soldiers drinking cold water after heat exhaustion; Napoleon's losses of 95,000 to sickness and straggling on the march to Smolensk in 1812.
- Our Town, Death and Attention
Our Town gives this tag concrete force through the medical material is quiet but important: doc gibbs, childbirth, mortality statistics, grief, and the care rituals surrounding death
- Passing, Part Three (ending)
Clare's fall from the window and Irene's collapse, followed by her blurred, possibly repressed recollection of the moment.
- Pensees, Fragments 139–143, 164–171, Section II
Diversion: gambling, hunting, war and court office as flight from thought; the king without diversion is wretched; death is easier to bear than the thought of it.
- Personal Memoirs, Preface
Grant notes he was 'reduced almost to the point of death' while writing and that his son F. D. Grant helped with the work.
- Ruth, Ch. 34–35
Ruth nurses Donne through the fever, falls ill herself and dies in delirium.
- Sense and Sensibility, Vol. II, Ch. 9
Brandon's account of the first Eliza, whom he found dying of consumption in a sponging-house.
- Sermons and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Devotions, bells and physicians
The sickroom is linked to doctors, neighbors, death bells, and the social meaning of mortality.
- Sermons and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Death's Duel
The sermon stages dying as theological confrontation and preparation.
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Books VII–VIII (winter 1917–18)
Daud's death from cold; Farraj wounded and killed by Lawrence to spare him capture and torture; Lawrence's growing exhaustion and despair before asking to be relieved.
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Book X (Tafas, September 1918)
A village massacred by retreating Turkish troops, followed by the order to take no prisoners; a key passage on reprisal and moral injury.
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Book X (Damascus, October 1918)
Lawrence finds a Turkish military hospital full of dead and dying men and organises its cleaning and burials amid the chaos of the city's first days.
- Siddhartha: An Indian Tale, Part Two, 'Om'
Kamala dies of a snakebite; later, Siddhartha's grief over his son is healed by listening to the river.
- Sixty Stories, 'The School'
A teacher recounts the cascade of deaths affecting his class and the children's questions about death.
- St. Thomas Becket and the Canterbury Miracles, Edward Grim murder account
The violent wounds of martyrdom generate relic matter and connect political violence to later healing devotion.
- Testament of Youth, Part II (Étaples)
Nursing German prisoners and, in spring 1918, gassed and badly wounded British soldiers in overwhelmed wards.
- Testament of Youth, Part II (Victor Richardson)
Victor, blinded by a wound to the head, is visited in a London hospital before dying of his injuries.
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 33
Injun Joe is found dead of starvation behind the sealed cave door.
- The Aeneid, Book 2
Aeneas narrates the fall of Troy, Priam’s death and the loss of Creusa as survivor testimony.
- The Aeneid, Book 6
The Sibyl’s possession and Aeneas’ descent to the dead frame prophecy as an altered state.
- The Aeneid, Book 12
Aeneas kills Turnus after a flash of rage at Pallas’ belt.
- The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Life of Alexander 75–77
Alexander's final fever at Babylon, day by day from the royal journals, with Plutarch's discussion of poisoning rumours.
- The Agricola and the Germania, Agricola 43
Agricola's last illness, the emperor's physicians and freedmen visiting, and rumours of poison.
- The Agricola and the Germania, Germania 27
Germanic funeral customs and mourning.
- The Annals of Imperial Rome, Book 12, death of Claudius traditions
Tacitus reports the famous poisoning tradition surrounding Claudius and succession.
- The Annals of Imperial Rome, Book 14, murder of Agrippina
Nero’s attempts on his mother’s life turn family violence into imperial policy.
- The Annals of Imperial Rome, Book 15, fire and Christians
The great fire and punishments of Christians show public trauma redirected into scapegoating.
- The Arthashastra, Book 4 (examination of sudden death)
Procedures for inspecting a corpse to determine whether death resulted from hanging, drowning, poison or violence.
- The Bacchae and Other Plays, The Bacchae, sparagmos
Agave and the bacchants dismember Pentheus while misrecognizing him as an animal.
- The Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 2.11–2.30
Krishna's argument that the wise grieve neither for the living nor the dead, because the self is eternal.
- The Birth of Tragedy, §3
The wisdom of Silenus, that it is best not to be born and next best to die soon, as the pessimistic ground of Greek art.
- The Birth of Tragedy, §§13–15
Socrates' daemon as a warning instinct, the dying Socrates, and the faith that knowledge can heal the eternal wound of existence.
- The Civil War, Book II.41–42
Curio's exhausted and wounded men cannot break out; Curio refuses flight and fights until killed.
- The Complete Poems, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
Whitman's Lincoln elegy turns national mourning into ritualized grief and meditation on death.
- The Conquest of Gaul, Book VI.13–16
Druid teaching on memory and the soul's survival; those suffering severe diseases vow human sacrifices to win back the gods' favour.
- The Conquest of Gaul, Book VII.77–78
Critognatus's speech proposing cannibalism, and the Mandubii, including old and sick people unfit for war, expelled from Alesia and refused food at the Roman lines.
- The Conquest of Gaul, Book VIII.44
Defenders of Uxellodunum have their hands cut off; the captive Drappes starves himself to death.
- The Consolation of Philosophy, Book 5
Providence and freedom are reconciled to preserve responsibility in the face of death.
- The Cost of Discipleship, Part One, Discipleship and the Cross
Suffering and rejection are presented as the mark of the follower; the call is described as a summons to die to the old self.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Château d'If chapters ('The Abbé's Chamber' to 'The Cemetery of the Château d'If')
Faria's cataleptic attacks, treated with drops of a red liquid; the third attack kills him.
- The Count of Monte Cristo, Late Paris section ('Locusta' and following)
Monte Cristo substitutes a narcotic that simulates death to save Valentine from poisoning.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ch. 1
The widow tells Peter Ivanovich of her husband's three days of incessant screaming before death.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ch. 6
The Caius syllogism: he cannot accept that the logic of mortality applies to himself.
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Ch. 12
Three days of screaming, the sensation of being pushed into a black sack, then light and the end of fear.
- The Divine Comedy, Paradiso
The Divine Comedy gives this tag concrete force through dante is rich for the history of mind: despair, fear, grief, bodily torment, purgative healing, visionary states, and spiritual therapy structure the journey
- The Early Christian Creeds, Apostles' Creed, articles on birth, death and resurrection
The creed moves through conception, birth, suffering, death, burial and bodily resurrection, offering a compact theology of embodied life.
- The Early Christian Creeds, Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (381), life of the world to come
The final hope of resurrection and future life functions as consolation in the face of death and communal suffering.
- The Early Christian Creeds, Chalcedonian Definition (451), two natures
Chalcedon's insistence that Christ is fully human protects the reality of embodied suffering from being treated as merely apparent.
- The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives, Life of Marius 45
Marius, aged and drinking heavily, falls ill with pleurisy and in delirium imagines himself fighting Mithridates.
- The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives, Life of Sulla 36
Sulla's final illness, described as an infestation of lice and an internal ulcer, ending in a haemorrhage.
- The Golden Legend: Popular Saints, Lives of plague and danger saints in the Golden Legend tradition
Roch, Sebastian, Barbara, and Christopher show how sudden communal or occupational risks were organized through saints before modern public health.
- The Histories, Book 2.84–88
Egyptian medical specialization and the three grades of embalming, with removal of brain and viscera.
- The Histories, Book 4.73–75
Scythians purify themselves after funerals by inhaling hemp-seed vapour in felt tents.
- The History of the Church, Books 5–6, martyr narratives
Accounts of imprisoned and tortured Christians make bodily suffering central to communal memory.
- The History of the Church, Books 8–9, Great Persecution
Executions, mutilations, mines and prisons under Diocletian dominate the late narrative.
- The History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 2.51–53
Caregivers die, laws lose force, burial customs collapse and despair spreads through the crowded city.
- The History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 7.75–87
The Sicilian retreat culminates in thirst, slaughter, imprisonment in quarries and catastrophic defeat.
- The Iliad, Book 1.43–52
Apollo shoots his arrows into the Greek camp, killing first mules and dogs and then men, for nine days.
- The Jewish War, Book 1, late Herod narrative
Herod the Great's final illness is described through bodily pain, feverish symptoms, ulceration and futile attempts at relief before his death.
- The Jewish War, Book 5, Jerusalem under siege
Crowding, corpses, factional violence and the shrinking food supply turn Jerusalem into a public health crisis before the final assault.
- The Jewish War, Book 6, famine in Jerusalem
The famine reaches its most extreme form, including the story of a mother driven to cannibalism, which Josephus uses as a sign of social and bodily collapse.
- The Jewish War, Book 6, burning of the Temple
The final fighting around the Temple brings fire, crush injuries, slaughter and mass death in a sacred precinct.
- The Jewish War, Book 7, Masada
The Masada episode presents collective suicide as a response to enslavement and defeat, requiring careful historical and ethical reading.
- The Lais of Marie de France, 'Les Deus Amanz'
A strengthening potion from a relative at Salerno; the lover refuses it and dies of exhaustion at the summit.
- The Lais of Marie de France, 'Yonec'
The hawk-knight is impaled on the spikes at the window and bleeds to death.
- The Last Days of Socrates, Apology 40c–41c
Death as either a dreamless sleep or a journey to converse with the dead: neither is to be feared.
- The Last Days of Socrates, Phaedo 116a–118a
The bath, the farewell, the friends' weeping, the drinking of the hemlock and the ascending numbness until death.
- The Master and Margarita, Part Two, Ch. 23
Satan's ball: Margarita receives a procession of poisoners and murderers from history.
- The Meek One, Part Two, Ch. 3–4
Her jump from the window holding an icon, Lukerya's account, and the narrator's anguish over the body.
- The Metaphysical Poets, John Donne, 'Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness'
Donne, on what he believes is his deathbed, imagines his physicians as cosmographers reading his body as a flat map.
- The Metaphysical Poets, Henry King, 'An Exequy to his Matchless Never to be Forgotten Friend'
King's elegy for his young wife, longing to join her in the grave.
- The Misanthrope and Other Plays, The Imaginary Invalid, Act 3
Monsieur Purgon curses Argan with a cascade of diseases; Toinette, disguised as a doctor, prescribes absurd remedies; Argan feigns death to test his family.
- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Ch. 2-3
The Ariel voyage exposes Pym and Augustus to intoxication, storm, near drowning and rescue after impaired judgment at sea.
- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Ch. 10-12
After mutiny and storm, the survivors face wounds, thirst and starvation on the wreck before drawing lots for cannibalism.
- The Nibelungenlied, Aventiure 16
Hagen kills Siegfried by striking the hidden vulnerable place while the hero drinks at a spring.
- The Nibelungenlied, Aventiure 33-39
The fighting in Etzel's hall emphasizes wounds, exhaustion, burning, thirst and the mass death of warriors trapped by honor.
- The Odyssey, Book 5
Odysseus is shipwrecked, battered and washed ashore exhausted, showing exposure, pain and recovery at the edge of death.
- The Odyssey, Book 11
The underworld journey stages grief, memory, sacrificial blood and conversation with the dead.
- The Oresteia, Agamemnon, Cassandra scene
Cassandra foresees murder, ancestral crimes and her own death while the chorus struggles to understand her.
- The Oresteia, Libation Bearers, tomb scene
Electra and Orestes perform mourning at Agamemnon’s grave and convert lament into revenge.
- The Persian Expedition, Book IV, Chapter V
The Armenian snows: deep drifts, a north wind, men dying overnight without fire or food, hunger-faintness, snow-blindness and frostbitten toes, with practical remedies.
- The Persian Expedition, Book V, Chapter VIII
Xenophon's defence at the army's audit: he struck men who left the disabled behind or tried to bury a living comrade, and forced stragglers to keep moving to prevent freezing.
- The Portrait of a Lady, Early Gardencourt chapters
Ralph's chronic illness shapes his observational life, his limited mobility and his imaginative investment in Isabel's freedom.
- The Portrait of a Lady, Mr. Touchett's final illness
Inheritance is decided at a sickbed, linking money, care, mortality and Ralph's experiment in enabling Isabel.
- The Portrait of a Lady, Ralph's deathbed
Isabel's return to the dying Ralph concentrates grief, confession, forgiveness and the bodily end of one of the novel's moral witnesses.
- The Power and the Glory, Final return to the dying American
The call to attend a dying man forces the priest back into danger and frames sacramental care as a duty to the body at death.
- The Quiet American, Phat Diem / war reporting chapters
Fowler's reporting confronts corpses, danger and the gap between military language and bodily suffering.
- The Quiet American, Place Garnier bombing
Civilian casualties after the bombing make Pyle's theory visible as wounds, blood and preventable death.
- The River War, Chapter III: The Dervish Empire
The Mahdi falls ill in June 1885; public prayers are offered; he dies of what his attendants recognise as typhus within days.
- The River War, Chapter XVI: The Fall of the City
Bombarded Omdurman: mangled civilians, houses crammed with wounded, decomposing bodies and animal carcasses.
- The Scarlet Letter, Ch. 23
The final scaffold confession and death present public truth as both spiritual release and bodily endpoint.
- The Sickness Unto Death, Preface and Introduction
The physician's bedside manner as a model for Christian exposition; the Lazarus story and the claim that despair, not death, is the mortal sickness.
- The Social Contract, Book III, Chapter XI
The body politic compared to a human body that begins to die at birth; the constitution of man is nature's work, that of the state the work of art and can be prolonged.
- The Song of Roland, Judgment after battle
The Song of Roland gives this tag concrete force through its battlefield scenes emphasize wounds, exhaustion, hearing, breath, and the ritual handling of the dead more than inward psychology
- The Theban Plays, Antigone, burial conflict
Antigone insists on rites for the dead despite state prohibition, making grief a public act.
- The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, final scene
The confrontation with Miles joins possible exorcism, panic, coercion and child death.
- The Twelve Caesars, Nero
Nero's violence, artistic grandiosity and suicide are presented through bodily fear, performance and death.
- The Twelve Caesars, Several lives
Poisoning rumors, assassination wounds and deathbed omens recur as instruments of political interpretation.
- The Underdogs, Final battle
The circular return to combat emphasizes death, repetition and the exhaustion of revolutionary purpose.
- The Vampyre, Greek episode
Ianthe's death after vampire warnings links folklore, bodily violation and the drained victim.
- The Vampyre, Final marriage plot
Aubrey's failed warning and death frame secrecy and social disbelief as fatal for his sister.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, §5
The last man: health-conscious, conflict-averse, managing his days with small doses of poison for pleasant dreams and a larger dose for a pleasant death; dissenters go voluntarily into the madhouse.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, Discourse XXI: Voluntary Death
Praise of dying 'at the right time' and scorn for lingering decline; important for the history of arguments about suicide and end-of-life choice.
- Treasure Island, Admiral Benbow chapters
Billy Bones's heavy drinking, stroke-like collapse and death bring alcohol, vascular crisis and fear into the opening.
- Troilus and Criseyde, Book V
Troilus's grief after Criseyde's betrayal turns toward battlefield death and the poem's philosophical release.
- Twelve Angry Men, Opening deliberation
Heat, impatience and life-or-death stakes create a pressure environment for group decision-making.
- Two Lives of Charlemagne, Einhard, health and death
Charlemagne's fevers, aging and final illness make the emperor's body a political and moral subject.
- Utilitarianism, Chapter II (the removable evils)
Poverty and disease presented as largely conquerable by education, social institutions, 'proper control of noxious influences' and science; those who care for others keep their interest in life on the eve of death.
- Wuthering Heights, Catherine's illness and childbirth
Catherine's emotional crisis becomes feverish illness, delirium, childbirth and death.
- Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff's final days
Heathcliff's visions of Catherine, refusal of food and death show grief as obsessive bodily unraveling.
Quotes
Frequently cited
“Mother, give me the sun”
“Till now, I had been a great sleeper, but a total privation of repose, with other alarming symptoms which have accompanied it, even to this time, persuaded me I had but a short time to live”
“O Agnes, O my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed”
“Praised be my Lord for our sister, the death of the body, from which no man escapeth”
“MEN fear death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children, is increased with tales, so is the other”
“Groans, and convulsions, and a discolored face, and friends weeping, and blacks, and obsequies, and the like, show death terrible”
“It is as natural to die, as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful, as the other”
“The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die has unlearned to serve”
“I am in conflict with the worst, the most sudden, the most painful, the most mortal, and the most irremediable of all diseases”
Frequently cited
“PROP. LXVII. A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life”
“To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death”
Frequently cited
“The horror! The horror”
Frequently cited
“and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”
“But, after the lapse only of a few days, the catechumen, seized with a languor, began to suffer from a violent fever”
“O Lord, if I am still necessary to your people, I do not shrink from toil: your will be done”
“Of human life the time is a point, and the substance is in a flux, and the perception dull”
“Hippocrates after curing many diseases himself fell sick and died.”
“Think continually how many physicians are dead after often contracting their eyebrows over the sick”
“I could not help reproaching myself for having consented to his visit in that sickly region in the summer-time”
“The child that bore my name, and in whose future I reposed with more confidence than I did in my own plan of life, now floats a mere corpse, seeking a grave in a distant land, with a weeping mother, brother, and sisters, clustered about him”
“How many trifling illnesses by that means become serious, how many serious ones become mortal”
Frequently cited
“Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed”
“Physicians will not heal thee, for thou wilt die at last. But it is I who heal thee, and make the body immortal”
“Later I was reduced almost to the point of death, and it became impossible for me to attend to anything for weeks”
“The universally kind feeling expressed for me at a time when it was supposed that each day would prove my last, seemed to me the beginning of the answer to "Let us have peace”
“And anon the knights smote him, and one of them smote off the crown of his head, and another brake the point of his sword upon the pavement”
“Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never; Never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams”
“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return”
Frequently cited
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me”
“Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts”
“The dying Socrates_ became the new ideal of the noble Greek youths,--an ideal they had never yet beheld”
“he embarked in a small boat with a few attendants, and was there murdered by Achillas and Septimius”
“They wish to inculcate this as one of their leading tenets, that souls do not become extinct, but pass after death from one body to another, and they think that men by this tenet are in a great degree excited to valour, the fear of death being disregarded”
“they who are troubled with unusually severe diseases and they who are engaged in battles and dangers, either sacrifice men as victims, or vow that they will sacrifice them, and employ the Druids as the performers of those sacrifices”
“Thus, being excited by the massacre at Genabum and the fatigue of the siege, they spared neither those worn out with years, women, or children”
Frequently cited
“There was no fear because there was no death. In place of death there was light.”
“"Death is finished," he said to himself. "It is no more!"”
Frequently cited
“All hope abandon, ye who enter in”
“The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows”
Frequently cited
“Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt”
“As virtuous men pass mildly away, / And whisper to their souls to go”
“Death, be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so”
“by the same token we shall all one day be dead, but that is no reason why meantime we should all be buried alive”
“Presently those who attended him could doubt no longer that he was attacked by typhus fever”
“Women and children lay frightfully mangled in the roadway. At one place a whole family had been crushed by a projectile”
“The body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries in itself the causes of its destruction”
“A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams. And much poison at last for a pleasant death”
“Die at the right time: so teacheth Zarathustra”
“Was THAT—life?’ will I say unto death. ‘Well! Once more”