Abstract
This chapter constructs a framework for understanding depictions of death in literature and illustrates this framework with critical commentary on three short stories. The framework makes use of ideas from evolutionary psychology, human life history theory, terror management theory, the psychology of meaning, the psychology of fiction, and evolutionary literary theory. This chapter explains why humans create literary depictions of death, describes how imaginative meaning works in literature, characterizes the emotions evoked in literary depictions of death, and characterizes the attitudes toward death adopted by authors and characters. After constructing this theoretical framework, the chapter gives examples of literature that describe the whole span of an individual human life, then uses three short stories that focus on specific themes in human life history. Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” illustrates survival as a motive. Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl” illustrates death in childhood. D.H. Lawrence’s “Odour of Chrysanthemums” illustrates death in an intimate pair bond. A final section summarizes the state of research in the main fields that have contributed to the theoretical framework and suggests directions for further development.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Alderson-Day, B., Bernini, M., & Fernyhough, C. (2017). Uncharted features and dynamics of reading: Voices, characters, and crossing of experiences. Consciousness and Cognition, 49, 98–109. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2017.01.003
Altmann, U., Bohrn, I. C., Lubrich, O., Menninghaus, W., & Jacobs, A. M. (2012). The power of emotional valence—From cognitive to affective processes in reading. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00192
Altmann, U., Bohrn, I. C., Lubrich, O., Menninghaus, W., & Jacobs, A. M. (2014). Fact vs. fiction—How paratextual information shapes our reading processes. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 9(1), 22–29. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nss098
Anderson, J. R., Biro, D., & Pettitt, P. (2018). Evolutionary thanatology. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 373(1754), 1–5 (Introduction to a special journal issue on evolutionary thanatology).
Baumeister, R. F. (1991a). Meanings of death. In Meanings of life (pp. 269–292). New York: Guilford.
Baumeister, R. F. (1991b). Meanings of life. New York: Guilford Press.
Baumeister, R. F., & Landau, M. J. (2018). Finding the meaning of meaning: Emerging insights on four grand questions. Review of General Psychology, 22(1), 1–10 (Introduction to a special journal issue on meaning). https://doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000145
Booth, W. C. (1983). The rhetoric of fiction (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Booth, W. C. (1996). Distance and point of view: An essay in classification. In M. J. Hoffman & P. D. Murphy (Eds.), Essentials of the theory of fiction (2nd ed., pp. 116–133). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
van den Bos, K. (2009). Making sense of life: The existential self trying to deal with personal uncertainty. Psychological Inquiry, 20(4), 197–217. https://doi.org/10.1080/10478400903333411
Boyd, B. (2009). On the origin of stories: Evolution, cognition, and fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Boyd, B., Carroll, J., & Gottschall, J. (Eds.). (2010). Evolution, literature, and film: A reader. New York: Columbia University Press.
Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought. New York: Basic Books.
Brown, D. E. (1991). Human universals. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Brown, D. E. (2004). Human universals, human nature & human culture. Daedalus, 133(4), 47–54. https://doi.org/10.1162/0011526042365645
Burke, M., & Troscianko, E. (2017). Cognitive literary science: Dialogues between literature and cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Buss, D. M. (1997). Human social motivation in evolutionary perspective: Grounding terror management theory. Psychological Inquiry, 8(1), 22–26. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327965pli0801_3
Buss, D. M. (2016). The evolution of desire: Strategies of human mating (revised ed.). New York: Basic Books.
Buss, D. M., Abbott, M., Angleitner, A., Asherian, A., Biaggio, A., Blanco-Villasenor, A., et al. (1990). International preferences in selecting mates: A study of 37 cultures. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 21(1), 5–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022190211001
Carney, J., & Robertson, C. (2018). People searching for meaning in their lives find literature more engaging. Review of General Psychology, 22(2), 199–209. https://doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000134
Carroll, J. (2011). Reading human nature: Literary Darwinism in theory and practice. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Carroll, J. (2012a). The adaptive function of the arts: Alternative evolutionary hypotheses. In C. Gansel & D. Vanderbeke (Eds.), Telling stories/Geschichten erzählen: Literature and evolution/Literatur und Evolution (pp. 50–63). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Carroll, J. (2012b). An evolutionary approach to Shakespeare’s King Lear. In J. Knapp (Ed.), Critical insights: The family (pp. 83–103). Ipswitch, MA: EBSCO.
Carroll, J. (2012c). Meaning and effect in fiction: An evolutionary model of interpretation illustrated with a reading of ‘Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’. Style, 26(3), 297–316.
Carroll, J. (2017). Introduction to the first issue: Why we need a journal with the title Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture. Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 1(1), vii–vxi.
Carroll, J. (2018a). Literary meaning: An evolutionary perspective. Literary Universals Project. Retrieved from https://literary-universals.uconn.edu/2017/02/09/literary-meaning-and-universals/
Carroll, J. (2018b). Minds and meaning in fictional narratives: An evolutionary perspective. Review of General Psychology, 22(2), 135–146. https://doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000104
Carroll, J., Gottschall, J., Johnson, J. A., & Kruger, D. (2012). Graphing Jane Austen: The evolutionary basis of literary meaning. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Carroll, J., Clasen, M., Jonsson, E., Kratschmer, A. R., McKerracher, L., Riede, F., et al. (2017a). Biocultural theory: The current state of knowledge. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 11(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000058
Carroll, J., Johnson, J. A., Salmon, C., Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J., Clasen, M., & Jonsson, E. (2017b). A cross-disciplinary survey of beliefs about human nature, culture, and science. Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 1(1), 1–32. https://doi.org/10.26613/esic.1.1.2
Chapais, B. (2013). Monogamy, strongly bonded groups, and the evolution of human social structure. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 22(2), 52–65. https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.21345
Chapais, B. (2017). Psychological adaptations and the production of culturally polymorphic social universals. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 11(1), 63–82. https://doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000079
Clasen, M. (2017). Why horror seduces. New York: Oxford University Press.
Clasen, M., Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J., & Johnson, J. A. (2018). Horror, personality, and threat simulation: A survey on the psychology of scary media. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000152
Clements, R., & Rooda, L. A. (2000). Factor structure, reliability, and validity of the death attitude profile-revised. SAGE Journals, 40(3), 453–463. https://doi.org/10.2190/xff0-c6ua-58pc-phpb
Damasio, A. R. (2010). Self comes to mind: Constructing the conscious brain. New York: Pantheon Books.
Dissanayake, E. (2011). In the beginning, evolution created religion and the arts. The Evolutionary Review: Art, Science, Culture, 2, 64–81.
Dreier, J. P., Major, S., Foreman, B., Winkler, M. K. L., Kang, E.-J., Milakara, D., et al. (2018). Terminal spreading depolarization and electrical silence in death of human cerebral cortex. Annals of Neurology, 83(2), 295–310. https://doi.org/10.1002/ana.25147
Fisher, H. E. (2016). Anatomy of love: A natural history of mating, marriage, and why we stray (2nd ed.). New York: Norton.
George, L. S., & Park, C. L. (2016). Meaning in life as comprehension, purpose, and mattering: Toward integration and new research questions. Review of General Psychology, 20(3), 205–220.
George, L. S., & Park, C. L. (2017). The multidimensional existential meaning scale: A tripartite approach to measuring meaning in life. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 12(6), 613–627. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2016.1209546
Gottschall, J. (2008a). Literature, science, and a new humanities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gottschall, J. (2008b). The rape of troy: Evolution, violence, and the world of Homer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gottschall, J. (2012). The storytelling animal: How stories make us human. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Gottschall, J., & Nordlund, M. (2006). Romantic love: A literary universal? Philosophy and Literature, 30(2), 450–470.
Harris, P. L. (2018). Children’s understanding of death: From biology to religion. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 373(1754). https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0266
Heine, S. J., Proulx, T., & Vohs, K. D. (2006). The meaning maintenance model: On the coherence of social motivations. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(2), 88–110. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr1002_1
Henrich, J. (2016). The secret of our success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hogan, P. C. (2003). The mind and its stories: Narrative universals and human emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hogan, P. C. (2013a). How authors’ minds make stories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hogan, P. C. (2013b). Narrative discourse: Authors and narrators in literature, film, and art. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Iser, W. (1974). The implied reader: Patterns of communication in prose fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Jacobs, A. M., & Willems, R. M. (2018). The fictive brain: Neurocognitive correlates of engagement in literature. Review of General Psychology, 22(2), 147–160. https://doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000106
James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology. New York: Henry Holt.
Johnson, J. A., Carroll, J., Gottschall, J., & Kruger, D. (2011). Portrayal of personality in Victorian novels reflects modern research findings but amplifies the significance of agreeableness. Journal of Research in Personality, 45(1), 9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2010.11.011
Jonsson, E. (2013). The human species and the good gripping dreams of H. G. Wells. Style, 47(3), 296–315.
Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J. (2016). Evil origins: A Darwinian genealogy of the popcultural villain. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 10, 109–122. https://doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000057
Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J. (2017). The bad breaks of Walter White: An evolutionary approach to the fictional antihero. Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 1(1), 103–120. https://doi.org/10.26613/esic.1.1.19
Landau, M. J., Solomon, S., Pyszczynski, T., & Greenberg, J. (2007). On the compatibility of Terror Management Theory and perspectives on human evolution. Evolutionary Psychology, 5(3), 476–519. https://doi.org/10.1177/147470490700500303
Lane, J. D., Zhu, L., Evans, E. M., & Wellman, H. M. (2016). Developing concepts of the mind, body, and afterlife: Exploring the roles of narrative context and culture. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 16(1–2), 50–82.
Low, B. S. (2015). Why sex matters: A Darwinian look at human behavior (Revised ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mar, R. A., & Oatley, K. (2008). The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of social experience. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(3), 173–192. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00073.x
Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., Djikic, M., & Mullin, J. (2011). Emotion and narrative fiction: Interactive influences before, during, and after reading. Cognition & Emotion, 25(5), 818–833. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2010.515151
Martela, F., & Steger, M. F. (2016). The three meanings of meaning in life: Distinguishing coherence, purpose, and significance. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 11(5), 531–545. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2015.1137623
Martela, F., Ryan, R. M., & Steger, M. F. (2018). Meaningfulness as satisfaction of autonomy, competence, relatedness, and beneficence: Comparing the four satisfactions and positive affect as predictors of meaning in life. Journal of Happiness Studies, 19(5), 1261–1282. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-017-9869-7
Martin, L. L., & van den Bos, K. (2014). Beyond terror: Towards a paradigm shift in the study of threat and culture. European Review of Social Psychology, 25(1), 32–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/10463283.2014.923144
McAdams, D. P. (2015). The art and science of personality development. New York: Guilford Press.
McAdams, D. P. (2019). “First we invented stories, then they changed us”: The evolution of narrative identity. Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 3(1), 1-18 (a target article followed by responses and a rejoinder). https://doi.org/10.26613/esic.3.1.110
McCrae, R. R., Gaines, J. F., & Wellington, M. A. (2012). In I. B. Weiner (Ed.), The five-factor model in fact and fiction, Handbook of psychology: Personality and social psychology (Vol. 5, 2nd ed., pp. 65–91). Hoboken, NJ.
Muraven, M., & Baumeister, R. F. (1997). Suicide, sex terror, paralysis, and other pitfalls of reductionist self-preservation theory. Psychological Inquiry, 8(1), 36–40.
Nelson, K. R. (2014). Near-death experience. Arising from the borderlands of consciousness in crisis., 1330(1), 111–119. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.12576
Nordlund, M. (2007). Shakespeare and the nature of love: Literature, culture, evolution. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Oatley, K. (2011). Such stuff as dreams: The psychology of fiction. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
Oatley, K. (2012). The passionate muse: Exploring emotion in stories. New York: Oxford University Press.
Oatley, K. (2016). Fiction: Simulation of social worlds. Trends in cognitive sciences, 20(8), 618–628. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.06.002
Oatley, K., Dunbar, R., & Budelmann, F. (2018). Imagining possible worlds. Review of General Psychology, 22(2), 121–124. https://doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000149
Panagiotaki, G., Hopkins, M., Nobes, G., Ward, E., & Griffiths, D. (2018). Children’s and adults’ understanding of death: Cognitive, parental, and experiential influences. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 166, 96–115. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2017.07.014
Parnia, S. (2014). Death and consciousness––an overview of the mental and cognitive experience of death. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1330(1), 75–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.12582
Paulson, S., Fenwick, P., Neal, M., Nelson, K., & Parnia, S. (2014a). Experiencing death: An insider’s perspective. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1330(1), 40–57. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.12473
Paulson, S., Kellehear, A., Kripal, J. J., & Leary, L. (2014b). Confronting mortality: Faith and meaning across cultures. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1330(1), 58–74. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.12474
Pettitt, P. (2018). Hominin evolutionary thanatology from the mortuary to funerary realm: The palaeoanthropological bridge between chemistry and culture. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 373(1754). https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2018.0212
Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S., & Greenberg, J. (2015). Thirty years of terror management theory: From genesis to revelation. In J. M. Olson & M. P. Zanna (Eds.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 52, pp. 1–70). New York: Academic Press.
Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (2005). Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Richerson, P., Baldini, R., Bell, A. V., Demps, K., Frost, K., Hillis, V., Mathew S, Newton EK, Naar N, Newson L, Ross C, Smaldino PE, Waring TM. Zefferman, M. (2016). Cultural group selection plays an essential role in explaining human cooperation: A sketch of the evidence. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 39, 1–68 (a target article followed by responses and a rejoinder). e30, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X1400106X
Rosen, D. H. (1975). Suicide survivors: A follow-up study of persons who survived jumping from the Golden Gate and San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridges. Western Journal of Medicine, 122(4), 289–294.
Salmon, C. (2003). Warrior lovers: Erotic fiction, evolution and female sexuality. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Salmon, C., & Symons, D. (2004). Slash fiction and human mating psychology. Journal of Sex Research, 41(1), 94–100. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224490409552217
Saunders, J. P. (2018). American classics: Evolutionary perspectives. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press.
Schofield, G. M., Urch, C. E., Stebbing, J., & Giamas, G. (2015). When does a human being die? QJM: An International Journal of Medicine, 108(8), 605–609. https://doi.org/10.1093/qjmed/hcu239
Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (1997). Return of the living dead. Psychological Inquiry, 8(1), 59–71 (Rejoinder to responses to a target article).
Steger, M. F. (2017). Meaning in life and wellbeing. In M. Slade, L. Oades, & A. Jarden (Eds.), Wellbeing, recovery and mental health (pp. 75–85). Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Tamir, D. I., Bricker, A. B., Dodell-Feder, D., & Mitchell, J. P. (2015). Reading fiction and reading minds: The role of simulation in the default network. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 215–224. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsv114
Tomasello, M., Carpenter, M., Call, J., Behne, T., & Moll, H. (2005). Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28(5), 675–691 (a target article followed by responses and a rejoinder). https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x05000129
Tomer, A. (2012). Meaning and death attitudes. In P. T. P. Wong (Ed.), The human quest for meaning: Theories, research, and applications (pp. 209–231). New York: Routledge.
Vessel, E., Starr, G. G., & Rubin, N. (2012). The brain on art: Intense aesthetic experience activates the default mode network. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6(66). https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00066
Watson-Jones, R. E., Busch, J. T. A., Harris, P. L., & Legare, C. H. (2017). Does the body survive death? Cultural variation in beliefs about life everlasting. Cognitive Science, 41(S3), 455–476. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12430
Wilson, E. O. (1998). The arts and their interpretation. In Consilience: The unity of knowledge (pp. 210–237). New York: Knopf.
Wilson, D. S. (2002). Darwin’s cathedral: Evolution, religion, and the nature of society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wong, P. T. P. (2007). Meaning management theory and death acceptance. In A. Tomer, E. Grafton, & P. T. P. Wong (Eds.), Existential and spiritual issues in death attitudes (pp. 65–87). New York: Erlbaum.
Wong, P. T. P. (2012). The human quest for meaning: Theories, research, and applications (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.
Wong, P. T. P., Reker, G. T., & Gesser, G. (1994). Death attitude profile-revised: A multidimensional measure of attitudes toward death. In R. A. Neimeyer (Ed.), Death anxiety handbook: Research, instrumentation, and application (pp. 121–148). Washington, DC: Taylor & Francis.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Carroll, J. (2019). Death in Literature. In: Shackelford, T.K., Zeigler-Hill, V. (eds) Evolutionary Perspectives on Death. Evolutionary Psychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25466-7_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25466-7_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-25465-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-25466-7
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and PsychologyBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)