This book examines deaths changing topography in Britain, France, the US, sub-Saharan Africa, British India, Australia and elsewhere from the perspectives of history, anthropology, and literary studies. It illuminates the religious and civil rites of passage societies created and maintained to mark dying, death and the treatment of human remains at a time when large forces were transforming the world.
The essays in this volume illustrate the ways in which power went to work in deaths realm during a period of severe dislocation associated with industrialization, urbanization and imperialism, and mass movements of people, both forced and free. They show how, between 1800 and 1920 in the west, certain peoples bodies were considered to be of more value than others, so while some were cared for and memorialized those who were socially disconnected and poor were vulnerable to being turned into objects of study or disposed of in paupers graves. Meanwhile, abroad, imperialists acted upon the belief that idealized western ways of dying and corpse disposal had most moral worth. In empires cause they interfered with others funerary and mortuary rituals, and deployed political and scientific theories to argue that high local mortality rates reflected a peoples own moral and material backwardness, and that the extinction of so-called savage races was inevitable rather than man-made.
A Cultural History of Death is part of The Cultural Histories Series. Titles are available as hardcover sets for libraries needing just one subject or preferring a tangible reference for their shelves or as part of a fully-searchable digital library. The digital product is available to institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access via www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com . Individual volumes for academics and researchers interested in specific historical periods are also available in print or digitally via www.bloomsburycollections.com .
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An authoritative exploration of the history of death in the period from 1800 to 1920.
Introduction
1. Dead and Dying Bodies, Christopher Hamlin, (University of Notre Dame,
USA)
2. The Sensory Aesthetics of Death, Elizabeth Hallam, (University of Oxford,
UK)
3. Emotions, Mortality and Vitality, Julie-Marie Strange, (Durham
University, UK)
4. Deaths Ritual-Symbolic Performance, Rebekah Lee, (Goldsmiths University
of London, UK)
5. Sites, Power and Politics of Death, Thomas Laqueur, (University of
California, Berkeley, USA)
6. Gender, Age and Identity, Andrea Major, (University of Leeds, UK)
7. Explaining Death: Belief, Law and Ethics, Patrick Brantlinger, (Indiana
University, USA)
8. The Undead and Eternal, Helen MacDonald, (Goldsmiths University of
London, UK)
Bibliography
Notes
Index
Helen MacDonald is Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of Possessing the Dead: The Artful Science of Anatomy (2010) and Human Remains: Dissection and its Histories (2006), which won the biennial Victorian Premier's Literary Award for a First Book of History and was short-listed for the Ernest Scott History Prize.
