Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Immortality in fiction" in English language version.
Although aware of their mortality, and perhaps because of it, human beings have always speculated about their finitude. In literature, this has created a particular genre, both oral and written, dedicated to the description of immortal figures and to a meditation on the mortality of human beings. Is death inevitable? Is there life after death? Can one escape death? These themes appear in many works of modern literature, where death is feared and immortality desired. There is an important distinction to be made between being undead and being immortal. The immortal is supposed to live forever. In contrast, the undead, although dead, cannot leave the world of the living or returns because he is unable to depart from it.
The suggestion that boredom, alienation, and the continual loss of loved ones might be prices well worth paying for the reward of eternal life is relatively rare, although it is acknowledged in Eden Phillpotts's The Girl and the Faun and loudly trumpeted by George Bernard Shaw's Back to Methuselah (1921) and by George S. Viereck and Paul Eldridge in My First Two Thousand Years.
The principal problem he addressed was the immortality of the inhabitants, and while repeating what he had said in The Emerald City, that no one died or was sick in Oz but that in rare instances a person could be destroyed, he went on to deal with the American characters: "Another strange thing about this fairy Land of Oz was that whoever managed to enter it from the outside world came under the magic spell of the place and did not change in appearance as long as they lived there."
By the twelfth book, nonetheless, the whole Land of Oz constitutes divine space in which mortals from the United States who are lucky enough to get there achieve a kind of immortality.
Contemporary scholars have already noted the influence of Taoism generally on Chinese fiction, but have neglected the specific influence of the concept of physical immortality. Closely linked with Taoism, the idea of physical immortality found its way into many popular Chinese novels written before the Chinese Revolution. In the sixteenth-century novel Feng-shen yen-i for example, [...]
The oldest written story known is the five-thousand-year-old Sumerian tale of a hero-king seeking immortality—Gilgamesh.
Contemporary scholars have already noted the influence of Taoism generally on Chinese fiction, but have neglected the specific influence of the concept of physical immortality. Closely linked with Taoism, the idea of physical immortality found its way into many popular Chinese novels written before the Chinese Revolution. In the sixteenth-century novel Feng-shen yen-i for example, [...]
James Gunn's The Immortals (1962) is an outstanding example of how contemporary science fiction can blend bodily immortality with scientific explanation and social commentary.
Yet our fictions often tell us that immortality is best only as a hope and never as an actuality, for, despite its venerable, obvious, and intimate appeal, the fantasy of immortality masks a terrible reality.
