Death within the Text

The book tackles the challenging theme of death as seen through the lens of literature and its connections with history, the visual arts, anthropology, philosophy and other fields in humanities. It searches for answers to three questions: what can we know about death; how is death socialised; and how and for which purposes is death aesthetically shaped? Unlike many other publications, the volume does not endorse the fallacy of over-simplifying death by seeing it either in an exclusively positive light or by reducing it to a purely literary figure. Using literature’s potential to stimulate critical thinking, many contemporary stereotypical configurations of death and dying are debunked, and many hitherto unforeseen ways in which death functions as a complex trigger of meaning-making are revealed. The book proves that death is an inexhaustible source of meanings which should be understood as peremptorily plural, discontinuous, problematic, competitive, and often conflictual. It offers original contributions to the field of death studies and also to literary and cultural studies.