The Unknown Country Death In Australia Britain And The Usa

In a strategy deliberately counter to many earlier texts which focus on social aspects of death and dying this book will not examine death through the social prism of US or British culture alone. Drawing only on material from a single society gives readers the misleading impression of a universal experience. As a text in the sociology of death and dying this volume examines culture-specific images and experiences of death in three major western societies - Australia, Britain and the USA.

In a strategy deliberately counter to many earlier texts which focus on social aspects of death and dying this book will not examine death through the social prism of US or British culture alone. Drawing only on material from a single society gives readers the misleading impression of a universal experience. As a text in the sociology of death and dying this volume examines culture-specific images and experiences of death in three major western societies - Australia, Britain and the USA.

In Performing Loss: Rebuilding Community through Theater and Writing, author Jodi Kanter explores opportunities for creativity and growth within our collective responses to grief. Performing Loss provides teachers, students, and others interested in performance with strategies for reading, writing, and performing loss as communities—in the classroom, the theater, and the wider public sphere. From an adaptation of Jose Saramago’s novel Blindness to a reading of Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play, from Kanter’s own experience creating theater with terminally ill patients and federal prisoners to a visual artist’s response to September 11th, Kanter shows in practical, replicable detail how performing loss with community members can transform experiences of isolation and paralysis into experiences of solidarity and action. Drawing on academic work in performance, cultural studies, literature, sociology, and anthropology, Kanter considers a range of responses to grief in historical context and goes on to imagine newer, more collaborative, and more civically engaged responses. Performing Loss describes Kanter’s pedagogical and artistic processes in lively and vivid detail, enabling the reader to use her projects as models or to adapt the techniques to new communities, venues, and purposes. Kanter demonstrates through each example the ways in which writing and performing can create new possibilities for mourning and living together.

This work provides a social history of death from the earliest times to Diana, Princess of Wales. As we discard the 20th century taboo about death, this book charts the story of the way in which our forebears coped with aspects of their daily lives.

An examination of private narratives of loss in wartime and publicly legitimized forms of grieving. Drawing on sources such as diaries, poetry and weblogs and using gender as an analytic category, the book looks at men's and women's experiences of war 'at home' and 'at the front' and spans the two World Wars, the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq.

"Glennys Howarth provides a cutting-edge, comprehensive discussion of the key topics in death and dying and in so doing demonstrates that the study of mortality is germane to all areas of sociology. The book is organized thematically, utilizing empirical material from cross-national and cross-cultural perspectives. It carefully addresses questions about social attitudes to mortality, the social nature of death and dying, and explanations for change and diversity, and explores traditional and contemporary experiences of death."--Jacket.

This book is a multi-disciplinary collection of death and dying studies, including chapters on philosophy, media studies, health care, literature, and political science.