View the Table of Contents.
Read the Prologue.
"Why are beheadings so captivating in society and literature?
Losing Our Heads: Beheadings In Literature And Culture tackles a
gruesome topic, providing a healthy dose of anthropological,
medical, social and literary insight to accounts of beheadings from
antiquity to modern times."
--"Bookwatch"
"To read Losing Our Heads is to experience that same "frisson"
Regina Janes ascribes to the guillotine--a powerful and seductive
and (excuse me) heady combination of gossip and scholarship."
--Kathryn Davis, author of "Versailles"
What is the fascination that decollation holds for us, as
individuals and as a culture? Why does the idea make us laugh and
the act make us close our eyes? Losing Our Heads explores in both
artistic and cultural contexts the role of the chopped-off head. It
asks why the practice of decapitation was once so widespread, why
it has diminished--but not, as scenes from contemporary Iraq show,
completely disappeared--and why we find it so peculiarly repulsive
that we use it as a principal marker to separate ourselves from a
more abarbarica or aprimitivea past?
Although the topic is grim, Regina Janesas treatment and
conclusions are neither grisly nor gruesome, but continuously
instructive about the ironies of humanityas cultural nature.
Bringing to bear an array of evidence, the book argues that the
human ability to create meaning from the body motivates the
practice of decapitation, its diminution, the impossibility of its
extirpation, and its continuing fascination. Ranging from antiquity
to the late nineteenth-century passion for SalomA(c) and John the
Baptist, and from the enlightenment topostcolonial Africaas
challenge to the severed head as sign of barbarism, Losing Our
Heads opens new areas of investigation, enabling readers to
understand the shock of decapitation and to see the value in moving
past shock to analysis. Written with penetrating wit and featuring
striking illustrations, it is sure to captivate anyone interested
in his or her head.
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