Focusing on the efforts to recover, repatriate, and rebury thousands of fallen soldiers from the China-Burma-India Theater, this chapter analyzes how the disparate treatment of American bodies and Chinese bodies defined the Sino-American relations in the immediate postwar period. The first part of this chapter examines how well-established institutions, ambulant resources, and cooperative regimes enabled US servicemen to salvage the bodies of American soldiers from distant theaters of war to reinter them in national and private cemeteries on American soil. The second part addresses the struggle of the Chinese government in Nanjing, the Chinese military command in India, and the Chinese communities in Burma to provide proper burials for the dead of the Nationalist expeditionary forces. China lacked the formal institutions and infrastructure to manage war graves in foreign territories, and failed to garner the support of local authorities. When the political chaos of the Chinese Civil War led to the cessation of funding from the Nationalist government, the graves of Chinese soldiers in India and Burma fell into oblivion.

This chapter offers an approach to the discourses of race and ethnicity in ancient Greek epic, specifically Homer’s Iliad and Apollonius’ Argonautica. The chapter begins by defining, theorising and applying a transhistorical concept of race and ethnicity which makes it possible to analyse the literary representations of ancient manifestations of ethnic and racialised oppression. Murray argues that epic poetry transmitted to its receiving society, whether ancient or modern, a mythical social order that placed the heroes, the demi-gods, at the top of the human hierarchy, and non-heroes, the people who are oppressed and exploited by the heroes, at the bottom. She also examines the specific construct of the epic hero, who can only really exist where non-heroes can be and are dehumanised by him. Murray analyses examples of this hierarchical structure and argues that this mythic social order, so integral to the society of Greek epic, was racial.

The chapter discusses ancient and modern treatments of Alexander’s death. It describes the omens said to foretell his death and their cultural and historical background, treating ancient versions of what led to Alexander’s death and attempts by historians and scientists to detect the working of poison, conspiracy, or less-violent and sinister causes. The rest of the chapter focuses on Alexander’s so-called last plans, their authenticity, the reasons for their rejection, and the contentious history of his body and burial.

In the nineteenth century the corpse became central to medical education. In Britain, a growing number of private medical schools opened throughout the country, involving the rise of the demand for dead bodies. It is exactly around the same time that Gothic fiction was revamped and offered insights into the debates around medical practice and education. This chapter explores the links between the field of anatomy and the development of Gothic fiction in Britain in the nineteenth century. It points out how the Gothic dealt with medical practitioners’ treatment of the corpse and how Gothic narratives dramatised the tension between the stealing, cutting up, preservation, and exhibition of human remains in medical collections and the central part played by anatomical knowledge in medical science. By looking at texts by John Galt, Mary Shelley, and Samuel Warren, as well as Wilkie Collins and Robert Louis Stevenson, this chapter not only shows how literary texts capitalised on the Gothic paraphernalia to foreground the regulation (or lack thereof) of the practice of anatomy before the passing of the 1832 Anatomy Act, but also highlights how the Gothic enabled authors to record cultural responses to medical practice throughout the century.

The formal, ritual laments in the Iliad provide both a particularly well-developed example of ritualized speech and a thematic linchpin of the way the Iliad tells its tale of the universality of sorrow and bereavement in war.