Advanced by way of various conventions and symbols, memento mori — “Remember that you will die” — is Gothic literature’s greatest cautionary warning. Although Peter Walmsley has suggested that this reminder to live with death in view is “the peculiar property of the British psyche,” it has required much repeating given what Edward Young identifies in his famous Night Thoughts (1742) as a universal tendency towards death denial: “All men think all men mortal but themselves.” Despite Geoffrey Gorer’s claim that death became the new pornography in the 20th century, uses of the Gothic mode continue to register an ongoing fascination with the Death Question that often vacillates, in various imaginative ways, between repression and acknowledgement.
- the afterlife and undead afterlives — zombies, angels, vampires, ghosts, etc.
- the corpse — abject, female, anatomized, and otherwise
- danse macabre
- acts/rites of mourning & memorializing — personal and national
- death of the author/reader
- dead women/deadly women
- the sanitization/medicalization of death
- decay and ruin
- live burial; gothic resurrections
- femme fatale/homme fatal
- spiritualism, séances, voodoo, and the Occult
- sex and death
- the aesthetics of death
- death and the visual arts/visual technologies
- Victorian necroculture
- manner of death: suicide (self murder); homicide; the war dead; mass murder; sudden death; capital punishment (torture, executions, serial killings)
- elegies and epitaphs
- symbolic/figurative death
- death and the double
- death and/by technology
- graveyards and graveyard poetry
- the death drive
- ars moriendi — the “Art of dying,” death/consolation manuals
- the Good death/bad death
- dead children
- wills, funerals, wakes