Death is an unanswerable question for humanity, the question that always remains unanswered because it lies beyond human experience. Music represents one of the most profound ways in which humanity struggles, nevertheless, to accommodate death within the scope of the living by giving a voice to death and the dead and a voice that responds. This book engages with the question of how music expresses and responds to the profound existential disturbance that death and loss present to the living. Each chapter offers readers an encounter with music as a way of speaking or responding to human mortality. Each chapter, in its own way, addresses these questions: How are death and the dead made present to us through music? How does music, as composed, performed and heard, respond to the brute fact of death for the living, the dying and the bereaved? These questions are addressed from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives: musicology, ethnomusicology, literature, history, philosophy, film studies, psychology and psychoanalysis. Singing Death also covers a wide range of musical genres from medieval love song to twenty-first-century horror film music. The collection is accompanied by a website including some of the music associated with each of its chapters.

The social and cultural changes of the last century have transformed death from an everyday fact to something hidden from view. Shifting between the practical and the theoretical, the professional and the intimate, the real and the fictitious, this collection of essays explores the continued power of death over our lives. It examines the idea and experience of death from an interdisciplinary perspective, including studies of changing burial customs throughout Europe; an account of a"dying party" in the Netherlands; examinations of the fascination with violent death in crime fiction and the phenomenon of serial killer art; analyses of death and bereavement in poetry, fiction, and autobiography; and a look at audience reactions to depictions of death on screen. By studying and considering how death is thought about in the contemporary era, we might restore the natural place it has in our lives.

Death and Garden Narratives in Literature, Art and Film: Song of Death in Paradise explores the combination of two motifs, death and gardens, to show how the two subjects are intertwined and used in various media and cultural contexts. Using cultural, literary, film, and art history theories, the contributors analyze various death and garden sceneries in literary works by Arthur Machen, Agatha Christie, J.K. Rowling, as well as in superhero comics, films, and cultural and art contexts such as Ian Hamilton Finley's "Little Sparta," the poetic verses from the Karoo Desert National Botanical Garden in South Africa, and the Australian wilderness.

Suicide is a puzzling phenomenon. Not only is its demarcation problematic but it also eludes simple explanation. The cultures in which suicide mortality is high do not necessarily have much else in common, and neither is a single mental illness such as depression sufficient to lead a person to suicide. In a word, despite its statistical regularity, suicide is unpredictable on the individual level. The main argument emerging from this collection is that suicide should not be understood as a separate realm of pathological behavior but as a form of human action. As such it is always dependent on the decision that the individual makes in a cultural, ethical and socio-economic context, but the context never completely determines the decision. This book also argues that cultural narratives concerning suicide have a problematic double function: in addition to enabling the community to make sense of self-inflicted death, they also constitute a blueprint depicting suicide as a solution to common human problems.

The goal of this book is to fully explore what the author refers to as 'the near epidemic levels of suicide and homicide-suicide' among law enforcement officers, and ultimately to offer recommendations and best practices with which to better address the problem. The book begins by discussing suicide in some depth, for one has to know suicide, unequivocally, to understand a suicidal or homicidal-suicidal officer. Suicide and homicide-suicide are complex, multi-determined events - the result of an interplay of individual, relational, social, cultural and environmental factors. The complexity of causation necessitates a parallel complexity of knowledge. There are at least two avenues to understanding: the nomothetic (general) approach, which deals with generalizations using empirical, statistical and demographic methods or techniques; and the idiographic (specific) approach, which typically involves the intense study of individuals. This book explores both. Attempting to be mindful of the needs of the office on the street, the mental health provider, the administrator, the forensic specialist, and the survivors of these needless tragedies, the belief is that by amalgamating the concerns of a diverse audience, we can meet the challenge of identifying at-risk individuals and situations, and saving lives.

Death affects all aspects of life, it touches our emotions and influences our identity. Presenting a kaleidoscope of informative views of death, dying and human response, this book reveals how different disciplines contribute to understanding the theme of death. Drawing together new and established scholars, this is the first book among the studies of emotion that focuses on issues surrounding death, and the first among death studies which focuses on the issue of emotion. Themes explored include: themes of grief in the ties that bind the living and the dead, funerals, public memorials and the art of consolation, obituaries and issues of war and death-row, use of the internet in dying and grieving, what people do with cremated remains, new rituals of spiritual care in medical contexts, themes bounded and expressed through music, and more.

When her husband's ill health forces them to move into an assisted living facility, Anne M. Wyatt-Brown suddenly finds herself surrounded by elderly residents. In this lively and provocative collection, other distinguished gerontologists reflect on Anne's moving account of her transition to becoming a member of a vibrant and sociable community that offers care-giving support, while encouraging her to pursue her own interests, including exercising, reviewing articles for scholarly journals, serving on committees, and singing. By redefining notions of care and community, undoing the stigmas of aging, and valuing the psychological factors involved in accepting assistance, this volume provides a bold new framework for thinking about aging, continuing care, making the big move to a retirement community, and living with vitality in the new environment.

The role of capital punishment in America has been criticised by those for and against the death penalty, by the judiciary, academics, the media and by prison personnel. This book demonstrates that it is the inconsistent and often incoherent jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court which accounts for a system so lacking in public confidence. Using case studies, Kenneth Williams examines issues such as jury selection, ineffective assistance of counsel, the role of race and claims of innocence which affect the Court's decisions and how these decisions are played out in the lower courts, often an inmate's last recourse before execution. Discussing international treaties and their lack of impact on capital punishment in America, this book has international appeal and makes an important contribution to legal scholarship. It also provides a unique understanding of the dynamics of an alarmingly problematic system and will be valuable to those interested in human rights and criminal justice.

Bringing social theory and philosophy to bear on popular movies, novels, myths, and fairy tales, The Gift and its Paradoxes explores the ambiguity of the gift: it is at once both a relation and a thing, alienable and inalienable, present and poison. Challenging the nature of giving as reciprocal, the book engages critically with the work of Mauss and develops a new theory of the gift according to which the gift cannot be reduced to a model of exchange, but must instead entail a loss or sacrifice. Ultimately, the gift is examined in the book as the impossible occurrence of gratuitous giving. In addition to exploring the conditions of possibility and impossibility of the gift, the book draws on the thought of figures such as Derrida, Serres, Simmel, Cixous, Irigaray and Heidegger to argue for the relevance of the phenomenon of the gift to broader issues in contemporary social sciences. It takes up questions concerning the constitution of community and the processes by which people are included in or excluded from it, gender relations, materiality, the economy, and the possibility that death itself could be a gift, in the form of euthanasia or self-sacrifice. A rigorous yet accessible examination of the phenomenon of the gift in relation to a range of contemporary concerns, The Gift and its Paradoxes will appeal to scholars and students within sociology, philosophy, anthropology, political theory and film and literature studies.

The connections between death, contemplation and the contemplative life have been a recurrent theme in the canons of both western and eastern philosophical thought. This book examines the classical sources of this philosophical literature, in particular Plato's Phaedo and the Katha Upanishad and then proceeds to a sustained analysis and critical assessment of the sources and standpoints of a single thinker, Arthur Schopenhauer, whose work comprehensively pursues this problem. Going beyond the well examined western influences on Schopenhauer, Singh offers an in-depth account of Schopenhauer's references to eastern thought and a comprehensive examination of his eastern sources, particularly Vedanta and Buddhism. The book traces the pivotal issue of death through the whole range of Schopenhauer's writings uncovering the deeper connotations of his crucial notion of the will-to-live.

Talking to the dead and communication with 'the other side' is often presented as a taboo in an increasingly technological and medically advanced world. However, practices of spiritualism and mediumship continue to remain popular and in high demand within contemporary Western societies. This book analyses the practices of today's mediums, who insist on standing at the threshold between life and death, interpreting signs and passing on communications, and asks how such concepts and practices are perceived by contemporary society. Using first-hand material gathered from alternative fairs, mediumistic congresses, seances, and interviews with both practitioners and clients, as well as thorough textual analysis, Anne Kalvig provides a clear overview of the various forms of consumption of mediumship in Western society and places these within a socio-cultural, religious and historical context. She also raises questions as to the controversies surrounding spiritualism and its representation and relationship with popular culture and the media. This book will be of interest to researchers in the field of sociology, religious studies, folklore, media studies and anthropology as well as to anyone interested in the upsurge of contemporary spiritualism, psychic phenomena and the paranormal.

The Genocide Convention explores the question of whether the law and genocide law in particular can prevent mass atrocities. The volume explains how genocide came to be accepted as a legal norm and analyzes the intent required for this categorization. The work also discusses individual suits against states for genocide and, finally, explores the utility of genocide as a legal concept.

Examining the automatic writing of the spiritualist seances, discursive technologies like the telegraph and the photograph, various genres and late nineteenth-century mental science, this book shows the failure of writers' attempts to use technology as a way of translating the supernatural at the fin de siecle. Hilary Grimes shows that both new technology and explorations into the ghostly aspects of the mind made agency problematic. When notions of agency are suspended, Grimes argues, authorship itself becomes uncanny. Grimes's study is distinct in both recognizing and crossing strict boundaries to suggest that Gothic literature itself resists categorization, not only between literary periods, but also between genres. Treating a wide range of authors - Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Du Maurier, Vernon Lee, Mary Louisa Molesworth, Sarah Grand, and George Paston - Grimes shows how fin-de-siecle works negotiate themes associated with the Victorian and Modernist periods such as psychical research, mass marketing, and new technologies. With particular attention to texts that are not placed within the Gothic genre, but which nevertheless conceal Gothic themes, The Late Victorian Gothic demonstrates that the end of the nineteenth century produced a Gothicism specific to the period.

The analogy of the torn fabric was first used by the author in response to a bereaved mother's cry: "I know what grief feels like; I don't know what it looks like." In "Mending the Torn Fabric: For Those Who Grieve and Those Who Want to Help Them", the author expands the metaphor to include earlier and future or potential losses as well as losses associated with the death that may be unrecognized or minimized. This book includes chapters that examine complications that may be present or may arise, suggestions for mending even the most torn fabric, and a chapter dedicated to friends who want to help. Stories bereaved persons have shared with the author through the years are interspersed throughout the book to provide examples of loss and mending.

This is the first international study of maternal care and maternal mortality. Over the last two hundred years, different countries developed quite different systems of maternal care. Death in Childbirth is a meticulously researched analysis, firmly grounded in the available statistics, of the evolution of those systems between 1800 and 1950 in Britain, the USA, Australia and New Zealand, and on the continent of Europe. Irvine Loudon examines the effectiveness of various forms of maternal care by means of the measurement of maternal mortality - the number of women who died as a result of childbirth. His scholarly and comprehensive study sets out to answer a number of important questions. What was the relative risk of a home or hospital delivery, or a delivery by a midwife as opposed to a doctor? What was the safest country in which to have a baby, and what were the factors which accounted for enormous international differences? Why, against all expectations, did maternal mortality fail to decline significantly until the late 1930s? Death in Childbirth makes an invaluable contribution to medical and social history.

Death in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death Choreographed explores new cultural research into death and funeral practices in medieval Europe and demonstrates the important relationship between death and the world of the living in the Middle Ages. Across ten chapters, the articles in this volume survey the cultural effects of death. This volume explores overarching topics such as burials, commemorations, revenants, mourning practices and funerals, capital punishment, suspiscious death, and death registrations using case studies from across Europe including England, Iceland, and Spain. Together these chapters discuss how death was ritualised and choreographed, but also how it was expressed in writing throughout various documentary sources including wills and death registries. In each instance, records are analysed through a cultural framework to better understand the importance of the authors of death and their audience. Drawing together and building upon the latest scholarship, this book is essential reading for all students and academics of death in the medieval period.

There has been a general assumption in the international debate surrounding organ procurement that Presumed Consent (opting-out) systems produce better results than Express Consent (opting-in) systems. This study uses the French case to challenge this widely held assumption and argues that the French presumed consent systems coexist with patterns of behaviour that in practice do not mobilize the law. It explores four key areas to current research in socio-legal studies focussing on the state and nature of social solidarity, social engineering and the changing nature of the citizen-state relations, state intervention in the event of death and discretion in use of corpses and recent modifications of the status of medical professionals as figures of authority and agents of state policy. Using material based on interviews with medical professionals, this title will be a valuable resource for researchers, academics, policy-makers and practitioners with an interest in this complex and topical subject.

As the use of human body parts has become increasingly commercialized, a need has arisen for new approaches to regulation that moves beyond the paradigm of altruism. During the course of this discussion, the notion of property has become a key concept. Focusing on practical and conceptual perspectives, the multidisciplinary group of authors, which includes specialists in philosophy, law, sociology, biology and medicine, have come together with practicing lawyers to consider both legal provisions and patterns of regulation in countries across Europe. Identifying divergences between different legal traditions, the authors explore various conceptual models which could be used to improve and to guide policy making. With this twin focus on practical and conceptual perspectives, this volume sets the standard for a detailed and innovative discussion of issues surrounding the regulation of research on human tissue.

This edited volume brings together leading scholars on the death penalty within international, regional and municipal law. It considers the intrinsic elements of both the promotion and demise of the punishment around the world, and provides analysis which contributes to the evolving abolitionist discourse. The contributors consider the current developments within the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the African Commission and the Commonwealth Caribbean, and engage with the emergence of regional norms promoting collective restriction and renunciation of the punishment. They investigate perspectives and questions for retentionist countries, focusing on the United States, China, Korea and Taiwan, and reveal the iniquities of contemporary capital judicial systems. Emphasis is placed on the issues of transparency of municipal jurisdictions, the jurisprudence on the 'death row phenomenon' and the changing nature of public opinion. The volume surveys and critiques the arguments used to scrutinize the death penalty to then offer a detailed analysis of possible replacement sanctions.

The regulation of the body provides an important concern in law, medical practice and culture. This volume contributes to existing research in the area by encouraging experts from a range of related disciplines to consider the legal, cultural and medical ways in which we regulate the body, further exploring how conceptions of self, liberalism, property and harm inform and influence contentious legal and ethical questions about what we can and cannot do to or with our own bodies.

In Time and Death Carol White articulates a vision of Martin Heidegger's work which grows out of a new understanding of what he was trying to address in his discussion of death. Acknowledging that the discussion of this issue in Heidegger's major work Being and Time is often far from clear, White presents a new interpretation of Heidegger which short-circuits many of the traditional criticisms. White claims that we are all in a better position to understand Heidegger's insights after fifty years because they have now become a part of the conventional wisdom of common opinion. His view shows up in accounts of knowledge in the physical sciences, in the assumptions of the social sciences, in art and film, even in popular culture in general, but does so in ways ignorant of their origins. Now that these insights have filtered down into the culture at large, we can make Heidegger intelligible in a way that perhaps he himself could not. White presents the best possible case for Heidegger, making him more intelligible to those people with a long acquaintance with his work, those with a long aversion to it and in particular to those just starting to pursue an interest in it. White places the problems with which Heidegger is dealing in the context of issues in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, in order to better locate him for the more mainstream audience. The language and approach of the book is able to accommodate the novice but also offers much food for thought for the Heidegger scholar.

This collection discusses appropriate methodologies for comparative research and applies this to the issue of trial transformation in the context of achieving justice in post-conflict societies. In developing arguments in relation to these problems, the authors use international sentencing and the question of victims' interests and expectations as a focus. The conclusions reached are wide-ranging and haighly significant in challenging existing conceptions for appreciating and giving effect to the justice demands of victims of war and social conflict. The themes developed demonstrate clearly how comparative contextual analysis facilitates our understanding of the legal and social contexts of international punishment and how this understanding can provide the basis for expanding the role of restorative international criminal justice within the context of international criminal trials.

How do twentieth and twenty-first century artists bring forth the powerful reality of death when it exists in memory and lived experience as something that happens only to others? Death in American Texts and Performances takes up this question to explore the modern and postmodern aesthetics of death. Working between and across genres, the contributors examine literary texts and performance media, including Robert Lowell's For the Union Dead, Luis Valdez' Dark Root of a Scream, Amiri Baraka's Dutchman, Thornton Wilder's Our Town, John Edgar Wideman's The Cattle Killing, Toni Morrison's Sula and Song of Solomon, Don DeLillo's White Noise and Falling Man, and HBO's Six Feet Under. As the contributors struggle to convey the artist's crisis of representation, they often locate the dilemma in the gap between artifice and nature, where loss is performed and where re-membering is sometimes literally reenacted through the bodily gesture. While artists confront the impossibility of total recovery or transformation, so must the contributors explore the gulf between real corpses and their literary or performative reconstructions. Ultimately, the volume shows both artist and critic grappling with the dilemma of showing how the aesthetics of death as absence is made meaningful in and by language.

Examining the compelling and often poignant connection between women and the material culture of death, this collection focuses on the objects women make, the images they keep, the practices they use or are responsible for, and the places they inhabit and construct through ritual and custom. Women's material practices, ranging from wearing mourning jewelry to dressing the dead, stitching memorial samplers to constructing skull boxes, collecting funeral programs to collecting and studying diseased hearts, making and collecting taxidermies, and making sculptures honoring the death, are explored in this collection as well as women's affective responses and sentimental labor that mark their expected and unexpected participation in the social practices surrounding death and the dead. The largely invisible work involved in commemorating and constructing narratives and memorials about the dead-from family members and friends to national figures-calls attention to the role women as memory keepers for families, local communities, and the nation. Women have tended to work collaboratively, making, collecting, and sharing objects that conveyed sentiments about the deceased, whether human or animal, as well as the identity of mourners. Death is about loss, and many of the mourning practices that women have traditionally and are currently engaged in are about dealing with private grief and public loss as well as working to mitigate the more general anxiety that death engenders about the impermanence of life.

Shedding light on the relationship between violence and contemporary society, this volume explores the distinctive but little-known theories of violence in the work of Georges Bataille and Jean Baudrillard, applying these to a range of violent events - events often labelled 'inexplicable' - in order to show how even the most extreme of acts can be seen as socially meaningful. The book offers an understanding of violence as fundamental to social relations and social organisation, departing from studies that focus on individual offenders and their psychological states to concentrate instead on the symbolic relations or exchanges between agents and between agents and the structures they find themselves inhabiting. Developing the notion of symbolic economies of violence to emphasise the volatility and ambivalence of social exchanges, Violence, Society and Radical Theory reveals the importance to our understanding of violence, of the relationship between the structural or systemic violence of consumer capitalist society and forms of 'counter-violence' which attack this system. A theoretically rich yet grounded expansion of that which can be considered meaningful or thinkable within sociological theory, this ground-breaking book will appeal to scholars and students of social and political theory and contemporary philosophy.