The social and cultural changes of the last century have transformed death from an everyday fact to something hidden from view. Shifting between the practical and the theoretical, the professional and the intimate, the real and the fictitious, this collection of essays explores the continued power of death over our lives. It examines the idea and experience of death from an interdisciplinary perspective, including studies of changing burial customs throughout Europe; an account of a"dying party" in the Netherlands; examinations of the fascination with violent death in crime fiction and the phenomenon of serial killer art; analyses of death and bereavement in poetry, fiction, and autobiography; and a look at audience reactions to depictions of death on screen. By studying and considering how death is thought about in the contemporary era, we might restore the natural place it has in our lives.
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Ricarda Vidal and Maria-José Blanco
PART I: DEATH IN SOCIETY
Chapter 1. Life Extension, Immortality and the Patient Voice
Catherine Jenkins
Chapter 2. Beyond 'Mourning and Melancholia'
Lynne M. Simpson
Chapter 3. War and Requiem Compositions in the Twentieth Century
Wolfgang Marx
PART II: DEATH IN LITERATURE
Chapter 4. Understanding Death/Writing Bereavement: The writer's experience
Maria-José Blanco López de Lerma
Chapter 5. A Way of Sorrows for the Twentieth Century: Margherita Guidacci's LaVia Crucis dell'umanità
Eleanor David
Chapter 6. From Self-Erasure to Self-Affirmation: Communally Acknowledged 'Good Death' in Ernest Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying
Corina Crisu
Chapter 7. Habeas Corpse. The Dead Body of Evidence in John Grisham's The Client
Fiorenzo Iuliano
Chapter 8. The Fascination with Torture and Death in Twenty-first-Century Crime Fiction
Rebecca Shillabeer
PART III: DEATH IN VISUAL CULTURE
Chapter 9. The Power of Negative Creation - Why Art by Serial Killers Sells
Ricarda Vidal
Chapter 10. Screening the Dying Individual: Film, Mortality and the Ethics of Spectatorship
John Horne
Chapter 11. The Broken Body as Spectacle: Looking at Death and Injury in Sport
Julia Banwell
Chapter 12. Death on Display: The Ideological Function of the Mummies of the World Exhibit
Diana York Blaine
PART IV: CEMETERIES AND FUNERALS
Chapter 13. The Romanian Carnival of Death and the Merry Cemetery of Sapânta
Marina Cap Bun
Chapter 14. In the Dead of Night: a Nocturnal Exploration of Heterotopia in the Graveyard
Bel Deering
Chapter 15. Scenarios of Death in Contexts of Mobility: Guineans and Bangladeshis in Lisbon
Clara Saraiva and José Mapril
Chapter 16. Karaoke Death: Intertextuality in Active Euthanasia Practices
Natasha Lushetich
PART V: PERSONAL REFLECTIONS ON DEATH
Chapter 17. Death isn't what it used to be
Lala Isla
Chapter 18. The Dad Project
Briony Campbell
Index
