Some descent to Hell narratives,
listed by historical period

Terms for Descent to the Underworld:  nekyia, katabasis (both Greek); descensus ad inferos (Latin ) 

Classical accounts:

The major classical heroes and heroines who undergo the descent to the underworld are: Aeneas, Daedalus and his son Icarus, Dionysus, Heracles, Hermes, Oedipus (figurative descent), Orpheus, Odysseus, Persephone, Prometheus, Tiresias.  

The most well-known accounts of their descents are found in: 

Homer,   The Odyssey, book 11, Odysseus greets souls from the 'pit' of the underworld and gets news of his

        future; this is the 'original' nekyia.

Virgil,   Georgics, book 4, the descent of the poet Orpheus to recover his wife Eurydice;

        Aeneid, book 6, the descent of Aeneas to Hell; this is the 'original'  descensus ad inferos

Ovid,   Metamorphosis, recounts nearly all the Greek myths of descent. 

Sophocles,  Oedipus the King 

Biblical accounts: 

Isaiah 14, 45  Satan is described wandering the earth, footloose and fancy-free.  Source for Defoe

Job 1   Job descends into the 'hell' of religious doubt, but he also suffers 'hell on earth'

Lot,    Lot's wife who (like Orpheus) looks back on Sodom, and turns into a pillar of salt.

David   A Christian Hercules,

Revelations  Describes Christ's Harrowing of Hell 

Medieval Literature :

Sir Orfeo,   romance descent of Orpheus in which the hero successfully retrieves Eurydice.

Augustine, Saint   The City of God (413-26 A.D.); Confessions--hell of one's own psyche

The Vision of Tundal,  a medieval vision narrative graphically depicting tortures in Hell , (c. 1150)

Dante Alighieri   Inferno (1314)- perhaps the greatest of all descent narratives? 

Ludus Coventriae;   Chester Mystery Cycle; The York Plays:  all these plays deal with the descent of Christ  

Renaissance Literature :

Galileo Galilei,   interesting ideas on Inferno;

Marlowe, Christopher  he Tragedy of Dr Faustus (pub. 1604)

Monteverdi, Claudio  Orfeo (Opera, 1607)

Shakespeare, William Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello 

Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature

Bunyan, John   Pilgrim's Progress (1678)-

Defoe, Daniel   The History of the Devil (1726); critic of Milton, and source text for Salman Rushdie. 

Gay, John   The Beggars Opera (1728)

Milton, John   Paradise Lost (1667),

Piranesi, Giovanni Batista Imaginary Prisons (painting) 

Romantic and Victorian Literature

Baudelaire, Charles Les Fleurs du Mal (1857); seminal text, again. 

Beard, John  The Autobiography of Satan (1872)

Blake, William Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93): an important reply to Milton, and source text for Rushdie;   Europe A Prophecy (1794):  this is more strictly speaking a narrative about a fall to hell

Browning, Robert  'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'

Byron, Lord  Manfred (Faust-drama), Cain (1822), Don Juan:  see notes above on Mozart's Don Giovanni. 

Coleridge, S.T.  Christabel, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but actually all his poems narrate a psychological descent

Dostoevsky,  Fyodor   The Brothers Karamazov (1880); Notes from the Underground, The Devils, etc. 

Goethe, J.W  Faust: a fragment (1770-1831)--most important version of the Faustus-myth. 

Hugo, Victor  Notre Dame de Paris (1831); La Fin de Satan (1886); Les Miserables

Keats, John Fall of Hyperion

Kierkegaard,  Soren The Sickness Unto Death (1849)

Lermontov, Mikhail   The Demon (1831-41)

Melville, Herman  Moby Dick (1851):  in many ways, is an important descent-text, a model for Conrad,

Mozart,  opera,. Don Giovanni (1787)--develops the Faust angle on the descent to hell. -

Poe, Edgar Allen The tell-Tale Heart

Rosetti, Christina  Goblin Market (1862)

Shelley, Mary  Frankenstein (1818)--recapitulates and replies to Milton, but is a new descent to hell

Shelley, Percy Bysshe   Prometheus Unbound, 'Essay on the Devil and Devils' (1819-20)

Swedenborg, Emmanuel  Heaven and Hell (1758), criticized by Blake, see below. 

Tarde, Gabriel,  Underground Man

Verne, Jules  Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 1864; 20,000 Leagues under the Sea

Wells, H.G. War of the Worlds 

Modern Literature

Benjamin, Walter

Conrad, Joseph  Heart of Darkness (1902)

Eliot, T.S. 'The Waste Land'; allusions to Dante in this description of London as contemporary Hell

France,  Anatole  La Revolte des Anges (1914, trans E. Jackson)

Freud,  Sigmund  'A Seventeenth Century Demonological Neurosis' (1923), trans James Strachey-devil's origin, a

Jones, Ernest  On the Nightmare (1931)--etymology of devil

Joyce, James  Ulysses, chapter 6, is also called 'Hades' to represent Bloom's visit amongst the 'dead'

Kafka,  Franz  'The Burrow', catalogues destructive effects of underground living, see Williamsp. 210

Lang, Fritz,  Metropolis

Lawrence, D.H. The Rainbow, Women in Love, The Plumed Serpent (set in Mexico; cf. Lowry), Apocalypse

Lewis, C S  The Screwtape Letters (1942)

Mann, Thomas  Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, Dr Faustus (1947); Joseph and His Brothers; The Magic Mountain

Orwell, George The Road to Wigan Pier, 1984

Pound, Ezra Cantos

Proust,  Marcel  Remembrance of Things Past --a descent into hell as memory

Rimbaud, Arthur  The Drunken Boat; A Season in Hell

Sartre, Jean Paul No Exit

Shaw,  G.B.  Man and Superman (1903,features Don Juan in Hell)

Strindberg Inferno (1896)

Williams, Charles Descent into Hell

Woolf,  Virginia  To the Lighthouse, Orlando

Yeats, W.B. The Second Coming, Sailing to Byzantium and Byzantium (poems) 
 

Contemporary Literature (post-1945)

Barker, Pat  Regeneration, The Ghost Road, etc., all retelling WWI as 'descents' into buried trauma.

Borges, Jorge Luis Nine Essays on Dante, Labyrinths

Borowski, Tadeusz   This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

Broch, Hermann The Death of Virgil (1945) trans Jean Starr Untermeyer (San Francisco:  North Point Press, 1983)

Bulgakov, Mikhail  The Master and Margarita, trans. M. Glenny (1967)

Calvino, Italo Invisible Cities

Carter, Angela  The Passion of New Eve, and The Infernal Desires of Mr Hoffman

Coetzee, J.M.  The Life and Times of Michael K

Cortez, Jayne  Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere, a feminist descent to read alongside Winterson?

DeLillo, Don Underworld

Elkin, Stanley The Living End (1979)

Ellison, Ralph  Invisible Man, starts and ends his story from a hole in the ground, and explains how he got there.

Faludy, George  My Happy Days in Hell (Hungarian picaresque autobiography of war years, pub. 1962)

Gaddis, William  The Recognitions (1955)

Golding, William  The Lord of the Flies

Grass, Gunther  The Tin Drum

Gray, Alastair  Lanark, an epic tale of descent from contemporary Glasgow, into sci-fi hell of the future

Havel, Vaclav  Temptation (a play by the Czech president that rewrites Faustus, 1985)

Heaney,  Seamus  Spirit Level, and other poems, use Dante's Inferno to map Ireland's spiritual malaise. 

Heller, Joseph Catch-22

Lessing, Doris  Briefing for a Descent into Hell:  tells a partly psychological, partly sci-fi descent

Levi, Primo  If This is a Man - important, Dantesque book about Auschwitz (1947)

Lowry, Malcolm  Under the Volcano (1947):  uses Dante and Faustus, to represent, a consul's and Mexico's hell

Mann, Thomas Dr Faustus (1947); see also under Modernism

Millu, Liana  Smoke Over Birkenau (described as the 'female Levi', publ in Italian in 1986)

Naylor, Gloria  Linden Hills, cf. Cortez and Winterson

Pynchon, Thomas, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) and Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

Rushdie, Salman The Ground Beneath Her Feet and The Satanic Verses (1988)--see Defoe and Blake, above

Stevens, Wallace The Palm at the End of the Mind:  Selected Poems and a Play (1967)

Walcott, Derek  Omeros, uses Homer and Dante to tell his country's struggle against imperialism.

Winterson, Jeanette   The Passion, depicts a feminist descent into the 'underground' of Venice.   

Theatre

Brecht, Bertold Baal

Cocteau, Jean Orpheus

Gide, Andre Persephone

Ionesco  Journeys Among the Dead; Exit the King

O'Neill, Eugene Long Day's Journey into Night

Williams, Tenessesse Orpheus Descending 

Film

Aliens--all of them, together. (1986)

Camus, Marcel Black Orpheus (1959)

Cocteau, Jean  Orphee (1949)--very important film-versions (2 of them) of this myth. 

Coppola, Francis Ford   Apocalypse Now (1979): a fascinating film version of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. 

Kubrick, Stanley  Paths of Glory, WW I film starring Kirk Douglas cf. Spielberg

Murnau,   Nosferatu (1922)

Regeneration, see Barker, above

Spielberg, Stephen  Schindler's List (on the Holocaust) and Saving Private Ryan (on WWI) 

Painting

Picasso, Pablo Minotaur Paintings??

Mondrian, Piet Landscape with farmhouse (1906); Farm at Duivendrech (1905), Tree on the Gein with Rising

        Moon (1907)The Red Tree, (1909), The Gray Tree (1912); Flowering Tree (1912)

Kandinsky, Vasily  Night (1906) Lyrical (1911) Horseman of the Apocalypse (1911)

Klee, Paul The Gates of Hades (1921)

Chagall, Marc The Dead Man (1908); The Funeral (1909)The Wedding (1910), The Dream (1927)

Miro, Joan Head of a Man (1937); Personage and Bird (1963)