Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and its Timings When is Death [Hardcover]

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

This volume provides a series of illuminating perspectives on the timings of death, through in-depth studies of Shakespearean tragedy, criminal execution, embalming practices, fears of premature burial, rumours of Adolf Hitlers survival, and the legal concept of brain death. In doing so, it explores a number of questions, including: how do we know if someone is dead or not? What do people experience at the moment when they die? Is death simply a biological event that comes about in temporal stages of decomposition, or is it a social event defined through cultures, practices, and commemorations? In other words, when exactly is death? Taken together, these contributions explore how death emerges in a series of stages that are uncertain, paradoxical, and socially contested. ??

Chapter 1. Introduction; Shane McCorristine.- Chapter 2. Being Dead in Shakespearean Tragedy; Mary Ann Lund.- Chapter 3 . ?'A Candidate for Immortality: Martyrdom, Memory, and the Marquis of Montrose; ?Rachel Bennett.- Chapter 4. Overcoming Death: Conserving the Body in Nineteenth-Century Belgium; ?Veronique Deblon and Kaat Wils.- Chapter 5. Premature Burial and the Undertakers; Brian Parsons.- Chapter 6. The Death of Nazism? Investigating Hitlers Remains and Survival Rumours in Post-War Germany; Caroline Sharples.- ?Chapter 7. Deaths Impossible Date; Douglas J. Davies.- Chapter 8. The Legal Definition of Death and the Right to Life; Elizabeth Wicks.- Chapter 9. The Last Moment; ?Jonathan R?e.- Chapter 10. Afterword; Thomas W. Laqueur.- Index

Shane McCorristine is a cultural historian with interests in the themes of mortality and modernity. Between 2013 and 2015 he was a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellow on the Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse project at the University of Leicester, UK.?

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.