This richly illustrated volume explores the eroticization of
death in the literature, art, and music of the nineteenth century,
and in the popular culture of our time.
Death was the natural enemy of love in the arts of the West
until the late eighteenth century, when the two mated in artistic
fancy to celebrate death as a font of sensual bliss. Through the
nineteenth century, voluptuous visions of death pervaded high
culture. Keats fell half in love with easeful death, and, as Heine
told it, Life only warms in death's cold arms. For Whitman, death
was the word of the sweetest song. Flaubert tempted his Saint
Anthony with Lust and Death fused into a single figure. Zola saw
love and death intermixed in the somber pit of the human soul. At
mid- century, painters and poets alike competed in depicting
Ophelia drowning in ecstasy. At the century's end the figure of the
femme fatale haunted the cultural elite. After 1914, the entire
morbid complex sank into popular culture.
What was the source of this eroticization of death in the arts?
To answer this question, Rudolph Binion explores a rich variety of
prose and poetry, painting and sculpture, and lyrical and
instrumental music, interlacing love and death. He compares modern
and premodern treatments of key subjects such as Salome and Mary
Magdalene, supporting his text with an array of arresting
illustrations. In conclusion, he traces this fantasy of carnal love
beyond death to the Christian message of spiritual love beyond
death, which modern, post- Christian culture has both discarded and
salvaged.
In "Love Beyond Death: The Anatomy of a Myth in the Arts,"
Rudolph Binion investigates the various art forms where the
conjunction of love and death is found and provides an explanation
for this bizarre match. Supporting his text with some of the most
sinister, alluring, and provocative images from the nineteenth
century, Binion provides the reader with a dizzying account of the
development of this artistic obsession, and of its passage into the
popular culture of the twentieth century.
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