The Power of Death (Paperback)

Ricarda Vidal

ISBN 10: 1785335103 / ISBN 13: 9781785335105

Published by Berghahn Books, Oxford, 2017

About this Item

Paperback. 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 adying 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. Multidisciplinary: humanities + social sciences.Death is analysed as a cultural event.Includes creative responses to death as well as academic essays. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9781785335105

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Power of Death (Paperback)
• Publisher: Berghahn Books, Oxford
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1785335103
• ISBN 13: 9781785335105
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Authors

Maria-José Blanco is a Lecturer and Language teacher in the Department of Spanish Portuguese and Latin American Studies (SPLAS) at King’s College London. She is the author of Life-writing in Carmen Martín Gaite’s Cuadernos de todo and her Novels of the 1990s (2013), and the editor of a special issue of Journal of Romance Studies, “Airing the Private: Women’s Diaries in the Luso-Hispanic World” (2009) and the forthcoming Feminine Singular: Growing up through life-writing in the Luso-Hispanic World (2014).

Ricarda Vidal holds a PhD in Cultural Studies (Birkbeck University of London) and teaches at the department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London.  She has published on urban space, the legacy of Modernism and Romanticism, speed, the car and driving as cultural phenomena, and society’s fascination with death and murder. She is the author of Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture: A Century of Romantic Futurisms (2013).