The Power of Death

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.

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.

List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors

Introduction
Ricarda Vidal and Maria-José Blanco

PART I: DEATH IN SOCIETY

Chapter 1. Life Extension, Immortality and the Patient Voice
Catherine Jenkins

Chapter 2. Beyond ‘Mourning and Melancholia’
Lynne M. Simpson

Chapter 3. War and Requiem Compositions in the Twentieth Century
Wolfgang Marx

PART II: DEATH IN LITERATURE

Chapter 4. Understanding Death/Writing Bereavement: The writer’s experience
Maria-José Blanco López de Lerma

Chapter 5. A Way of Sorrows for the Twentieth Century: Margherita Guidacci’s LaVia Crucis dell’umanità
Eleanor David

Chapter 6. From Self-Erasure to Self-Affirmation: Communally Acknowledged ‘Good Death’ in Ernest Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying
Corina Crisu

Chapter 7. Habeas Corpse. The Dead Body of Evidence in John Grisham’s The Client
Fiorenzo Iuliano

Chapter 8. The Fascination with Torture and Death in Twenty-first-Century Crime Fiction
Rebecca Shillabeer

PART III: DEATH IN VISUAL CULTURE

Chapter 9. The Power of Negative Creation – Why Art by Serial Killers Sells
Ricarda Vidal

Chapter 10. Screening the Dying Individual: Film, Mortality and the Ethics of Spectatorship
John Horne

Chapter 11. The Broken Body as Spectacle: Looking at Death and Injury in Sport
Julia Banwell

Chapter 12. Death on Display: The Ideological Function of the Mummies of the World Exhibit
Diana York Blaine

PART IV: CEMETERIES AND FUNERALS

Chapter 13. The Romanian Carnival of Death and the Merry Cemetery of  Săpânţa
Marina Cap Bun

Chapter 14. In the Dead of Night: a Nocturnal Exploration of Heterotopia in the Graveyard
Bel Deering

Chapter 15. Scenarios of Death in Contexts of Mobility: Guineans and Bangladeshis in Lisbon
Clara Saraiva and José Mapril

Chapter 16. Karaoke Death: Intertextuality in Active Euthanasia Practices
Natasha Lushetich

PART V: PERSONAL REFLECTIONS ON DEATH

Chapter 17. Death isn't what it used to be
Lala Isla

Chapter 18. The Dad Project
Briony Campbell

Index