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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.
List of contents
Introduction - 1 | Empty Tombs and Apparitions: A Reflection on the Theological Significance of the Exhumation of the emains of John Henry Newman. - 2 | John Donne, Undone, Redone: the John Donne Monument Reconsidered. - 3 | Stalin's Death and Afterlife. - 4 | The Mutilation and Non-Burial of the Dead in Homer's Iliad. - 5 | Identity and the Act of Dying: Sketching a Philosophical Perspective. - 6 | 'emotional rather than cerebral'? Charles Villiers Stanford's Requiem. - 7 | Arrigo Boito and Giovanni Verga: the Body, Illness and Death in Mastro-don Gesualdo. - 8 | Death, Medicine, Literature: Foucault in 1963.
Summary
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.
