Edited by : Philip Cottrell and Wolfgang Marx
Publication Date 14th, May, 2014
ISBN 978-1-909325-46-3
Cost €20.00
The essays incorporated into this volume share an ambitious interest in investigating death as an individual, social and metaphorical phenomenon that may be exemplified by themes involving burial rituals, identity, and commemoration. The disciplines represented are as diverse as art history, classics, history, music, languages and literatures, and the approaches taken reflect various aspects of contemporary death studies. These include the fear of death, the role of death in shaping human identity, the ‘taming’ of death through ritual or aesthetic sublimation, and the utilization of death – particularly dead bodies – to manipulate social and political ends.
The topics covered include the exhumation and reburial of Cardinal John Henry Newman; the funerary monument of John Donne in his shroud; the funeral of Joseph Stalin; the theme of mutilation and non-burial of the corpse in Homer’s Iliad; the individual’s encounter with death in the work of the German Philosopher Josef Pieper; the Requiem by the Irish composer Charles Villiers Stanford; the imagery of death in Giovanni Verga’s novel Mastro-don Gesualdo, and the changing attitudes toward death in the writings of Michel Foucault.
Framed by literary and philosophical routes from Romanticism to the Realism of the new Italian State, and from pathologies to health in Foucault, this set of essays displays sparkling cultural insights into subjects involving Cardinal Newman, John Donne, the symbolic body of Stalin in death, Homer’s Illiad and Stanford’s Requiem. Serious intellectual concerns arise from these reflections on tombs, decomposition, and the music of grief, to mark the existential, religious, philosophical, and political dynamics of death; all exemplify the advantage gained through collaborative research in the Arts and Humanities.
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