PUBLICITY TITLE First book to take the reader through medical, bureaucratic, commercial and ritual aspects of death. Illustrated with original and professional photography. Draws on conversations with staff in hospitals, registry offices, funeral parlours and cemeteries.

In this richly illustrated volume, Paul Binski provides an absorbing account of the social, theological, and cultural issues involved in death and dying in Europe from the end of the Roman Empire to the early sixteenth century. He draws on textual, archaeological, and art historical sources to examine pagan and Christian attitudes toward the dead, the aesthetics of death and the body, burial ritual, and mortuary practice. Illustrated throughout with fascinating and sometimes disturbing images, Binski's account weaves together close readings of a variety of medieval thinkers. He discusses the impact of the Black Death on late medieval art and examines the development of the medieval tomb, showing the changing attitudes toward the commemoration of the dead between late antiquity and the late Middle Ages. In one chapter, Binski analyzes macabre themes in art and literature, including the Dance of Death, which reflect the medieval obsession with notions of humility, penitence, and the dangers of bodily corruption. In another, he studies the progress of the soul after death through the powerful descriptions of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory in Dante and other writers and through portrayals of the Last Judgment and the Apocalypse in sculpture and large-scale painting.

If the academic field of death studies is a prosperous one, there still seems to be a level of mistrust concerning the capacity of literature to provide socially relevant information about death and to help improve the anthropological understanding of how culture is shaped by the human condition of mortality. Furthermore, the relationship between literature and death tends to be trivialized, in the sense that death representations are interpreted in an over-aestheticized manner. As such, this approach has a propensity to consider death in literature to be significant only for literary studies, and gives rise to certain persistent clichés, such as the power of literature to annihilate death. This volume overcomes such stereotypes, and reveals the great potential of literary studies to provide fresh and accurate ways of interrogating death as a steady and unavoidable human reality and as an ever-continuing socio-cultural construction. The volume brings together researchers from various countries – the USA, the UK, France, Poland, New Zealand, Canada, India, Germany, Greece, and Romania – with different academic backgrounds in fields as diverse as literature, art history, social studies, criminology, musicology, and cultural studies, and provides answers to questions such as: What are the features of death representations in certain literary genres? Is it possible to speak of an homogeneous vision of death in the case of some literary movements? How do writers perceive, imagine, and describe their death through their personal diaries, or how do they metabolize the death of the “significant others” through their writings? To what extent does the literary representation of death refer to the extra-fictional, socio-historically constructed “Death”? Is it moral to represent death in children’s literature? What are the differences and similarities between representing death in literature and death representations in other connected fields? Are metaphors and literary representations of death forms of death denial, or, on the contrary, a more insightful way of capturing the meaning of death?

This collection traces the vicissitudes of the cultural preoccupation with death in nineteenth-century US writing and examines how mortality served paradoxically as a site on which identity and subjectivity were productively rethought. Topics include race- and gender-based investigations into the textual representation of death, imaginative constructions and re-constructions of social practice with regard to loss and memorialisation, and literary re-conceptualisations of death forced by personal and national trauma.

Recent events such as the massacres in Dunblane and Arkansas, the deaths of children in terrorist attacks, civil wars and famines, children born with AIDS, and the many abductions and murders of children - including some by children - have placed childhood death firmly in the public consciousness. But how do we understand what it means for a child to die? This book examines the way the deaths of children have been dealt with at different times and in different media. Each contributor has focused on a different way of representing the deaths of children - from superstitions about malign child ghosts through mothers' diaries to horror fiction - and more.

Drawing upon a rare and highly original ethnography of contemporary mortuary practices, Representations of Death takes the reader through the medical, bureaucratic, commercial and ritual aspects of death Going behind the scenes at hospitals, funeral parlours, crematoria and cemeteries, as well as holding poignant, in-depth interviews with bereaved women, Bradbury has been able to illuminate the very different perspectives of the deathwork professional and the grieving relative. Illustrated with stunning photographs, this fascinating book makes a significant contribution to the growing literature in death studies.

Studies representations of women and death by women to see whether and how they differ from patriarchal versions.

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.

In recent years there has been a massive upsurge in academic, professional and lay interest in mortality. This is reflected in academic and professional literature, in the popular media and in the proliferation of professional roles and training courses associated with aspects of death and dying. Until now the majority of reference material on death and dying has been designed for particular disciplinary audiences and has addressed only specific academic or professional concerns. There has been an urgent need for an authoritative but accessible reference work reflecting the multidisciplinary nature of the field. This Encyclopedia answers that need. The Encyclopedia of Death and Dying consolidates and contextualizes the disparate research that has been carried out to date. The phenomena of death and dying and its related concepts are explored and explained in depth, from the approaches of varied disciplines and related professions in the arts, social sciences, humanities, medicine and the sciences. In addition to scholars and students in the field-from anthropologists and sociologists to art and social historians - the Encyclopedia will be of interest to other professionals and practitioners whose work brings them into contact with dying, dead and bereaved people. It will be welcomed as the definitive death and dying reference source, and an essential tool for teaching, research and independent study.

This nuanced study traces how Chinese came to view death as an opportunity to fashion and convey social identities and memories during the medieval period (200–1000) and the Tang dynasty (618–907), specifically. As Chinese society became increasingly multicultural and multireligious, to achieve these aims people selectively adopted, portrayed, and interpreted various acts of remembrance. Included in these were new and evolving burial, mourning, and commemorative practices: joint-burials of spouses, extended family members, and coreligionists; relocation and reburial of bodies; posthumous marriage and divorce; interment of a summoned soul in the absence of a body; and many changes to the classical mourning and commemorative rites that became the norm during the period. Individuals independently constructed the socio-religious meanings of a particular death and the handling of corpses by engaging in and reviewing acts of remembrance. Drawing on a variety of sources, including hundreds of newly excavated entombed epitaph inscriptions, Inscribing Death illuminates the process through which the living—and the dead—negotiated this multiplicity of meanings and how they shaped their memories and identities both as individuals and as part of collectives. In particular, it details the growing emphasis on remembrance as an expression of filial piety and the grave as a focal point of ancestral sacrifice. The work also identifies different modes of construction and representation of the self in life and death, deepening our understanding of ancestral worship and its changing modus operandi and continuous shaping influence on the most intimate human relationships—thus challenging the current monolithic representation of ancestral worship as an extension of families rather than individuals in medieval China.