The Afterlife in Popular Culture: Heaven, Hell, and the Underworld in the American Imagination

A valuable resource that will give students a fresh look at how Americans view the afterlife, helping readers understand how it’s depicted in popular culture.

What happens to us when we die? This book seeks to explore how that question has been answered in American popular culture. It begins with five framing essays that provide historical and intellectual background on ideas about the afterlife in Western culture. These essays are followed by more than 100 entries, each focusing on specific cultural products or authors that feature the afterlife front and center. Entry topics include novels, film, television shows, plays, works of nonfiction, graphic novels, and more, all of which address some aspect of what may await us after our passing.

This book is unique in marrying a historical overview of the afterlife with detailed analyses of particular cultural products, such as films and novels. In addition, it covers these topics in nonspecialist language, written with a student audience in mind. The book provides historical context for contemporary depictions of the afterlife addressed in the entries, which deal specifically with work produced in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Kevin O’Neill is emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Redlands, where he has taught since helping to found the experimental Johnston Center in 1969.