Death, Burial, and the Afterlife

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.