Mourning Texts as Literature and Philosophy

Obituaries reveal a culture’s values, virtues, and constituents of wellbeing. Speaking well of the dead enables us to tell the story both of individuals who have passed away and of the cultures that shaped them and in which they participated. In so doing, we weave those we held dear into the fabric of human nature, human achievement, and human possibility.

This book aims to contribute to our understanding of the rich tapestry of human values and virtues by examining and comparing obituaries, poetic elegies, eulogies, and other funerary texts. New digital humanities tools are brought to bear to aggregate, compare, and visualize a vast repository of necrologies: over twenty million texts from recent decades, as well as hundreds of texts from previous periods