Читать книгу Writers on... Death (A Book of Quotes, Poems and Literary Reflections) - Amelia Carruthers - Страница 9
Оглавление[no image in epub file]
5
who wants to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.' In some of the writing in the following pages, including Byron's 'Epitaph to a Dog', Hans Christian Andersen's 'The Story of a Mother' or Shelley's 'Elegy on the Death of John Keats', once gets the immediate impression that the writer is truly paying their 'emotional debts'. Death is not always expected, neat and 'final', and this comes across in much of the writing on the subject.
Death in literature is an incredibly varied thing, just as death is wide-ranging in life. It is an inescapable destiny for each of us as individuals, and as such, has permeated the imagination of the greatest literary minds. Writers on... Death should hopefully demonstrate the ability of this most universal (and least understood) subjects to enhance the readers understanding of a text, its author, its characters and the wider world around us. This collection is intended as a comprehensive introduction, across time and geographical location, to the world's most influential writers, and their thoughts on death. As the following excerpts and quotations will show, judgments on death are as varied as they are universal, as primordial as they are contemporary, and as superfluous as they are indispensable. Thinking about death helps us think about existence - and what is literature, if not an attempt to understand life?
