Death Within The Text

The book tackles the challenging theme of death as seen through the lens of literature and its connections with history, the visual arts, anthropology, philosophy and other fields in humanities. It searches for answers to three questions: what can we know about death; how is death socialised; and how and for which purposes is death aesthetically shaped? Unlike many other publications, the volume does not endorse the fallacy of over-simplifying death by seeing it either in an exclusively positive light or by reducing it to a purely literary figure. Using literature’s potential to stimulate critical thinking, many contemporary stereotypical configurations of death and dying are debunked, and many hitherto unforeseen ways in which death functions as a complex trigger of meaning-making are revealed. The book proves that death is an inexhaustible source of meanings which should be understood as peremptorily plural, discontinuous, problematic, competitive, and often conflictual. It offers original contributions to the field of death studies and also to literary and cultural studies.

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?

"Dying and Death in Canada offers a comprehensive discussion of dying, death, and bereavement from a Canadian perspective. The third edition has been thoroughly updated and several new topics have been added, including assisted suicide and active euthanasia, end of life care, emerging trends in funerary practices, and changing conceptualizations and interventions in the grieving process. A glossary has also been added along with end-of-chapter review questions and an appendix listing recent and seminal movies, television programs, documentary films, and other visual media sources dealing with dying and death. The new edition includes 22 black and white photos, 4 figures, and 3 tables."--

Death is an inevitable, yet mysterious event. Fiction is one way to imagine and gain knowledge of death. Death is very useful to literature, as it creates plot twists, suspense, mysteries, and emotional effects in narrations. But more importantly, stories about death seem to have an existential importance to our lives. Stories provide fictional encounters with death and give meaning for both death and life. Thus, death is more than a physical or psychological experience in literature; it also highlights existential questions concerning humanity and storytelling. This volume, entitled Death in Literature, approaches death by examining the narratives and spectacles of death, dying and mortality in different literary genres. The articles consider literary representations of death from ancient Rome to the Netherlands today, and explore ways of dealing with death and dying. The discussions also transcend the boundaries of literature by studying literary representations of such socially relevant and death-related issues as euthanasia and suicide. The articles offer a broad perspective on death’s role in literature as well as literature’s role in the social and cultural debates about death.

In 1846, Edgar Allen Poe wrote that 'the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the world'. The conjuction of death, art and femininity forms a rich and disturbing strata of Western culture, explored here in fascinating detail by Elisabeth Bronfen. Her examples range from Carmen to Little Nell, from Wuthering Heights to Vertigo, from Snow White to Frankenstein. The text is richly illustrated throughout with thirty-seven paintings and photographs. The argument that this book presents is that narrative and visual representations of death can be read as symptoms of our culture and because the feminine body is culturally constructed as the superlative site of "other" and "not me", culture uses art to dream the deaths of beautiful women.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE’S 100 BEST YA BOOKS OF ALL TIME The extraordinary, beloved novel about the ability of books to feed the soul even in the darkest of times. When Death has a story to tell, you listen. It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement. In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak, author of I Am the Messenger, has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time. “The kind of book that can be life-changing.” —The New York Times “Deserves a place on the same shelf with The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank.” —USA Today DON’T MISS BRIDGE OF CLAY, MARKUS ZUSAK’S FIRST NOVEL SINCE THE BOOK THIEF.