Death, Burial, and the Afterlife

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The essays incorporated into this volume share an ambitious interest in investigating deathas an individual, social and metaphorical phenomenon that may be exemplified by themesinvolving burial rituals, identity, and commemoration. The disciplines represented are asdiverse as art history, classics, history, music, languages and literatures, and the approachestaken 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 aestheticsublimation, and the utilization of death - particularly dead bodies - to manipulate socialand 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'sencounter with death in the work of the German Philosopher Josef Pieper, the Requiemby the Irish composer Charles Villiers Stanford, the imagery of death in Giovanni Verga'snovel Mastro-don Gesualdo, and the changing attitudes toward death in the writings ofMichel Foucault.