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Early nineteenth-century British literature is overpopulated with
images of dead and deadly animals, as Chase Pielak observes in his
study of animal encounters in the works of Charles and Mary Lamb,
John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and William
Wordsworth. These encounters, Pielak suggests, coincide with
anxieties over living alongside both animals and cemeteries in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries. Pielak traces the
linguistic, physical, and psychological interruptions occasioned by
animal encounters from the heart of communal life, the table, to
the countryside, and finally into and beyond the wild cemetery. He
argues that Romantic period writers use language that ultimately
betrays itself in beastly disruptions exposing anxiety over what it
means to be human, what happens at death, the consequences of
living together, and the significance of being remembered.
Extending his discussion past an emphasis on animal rights to an
examination of animals in their social context, Pielak shows that
these animal representations are both inherently important and a
foreshadowing of the ways we continue to need images of dead and
deadly Romantic beasts.
Early nineteenth-century British literature is overpopulated with
images of dead and deadly animals, as Chase Pielak observes in his
study of animal encounters in the works of Charles and Mary Lamb,
John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and William
Wordsworth. These encounters, Pielak suggests, coincide with
anxieties over living alongside both animals and cemeteries in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries. Pielak traces the
linguistic, physical, and psychological interruptions occasioned by
animal encounters from the heart of communal life, the table, to
the countryside, and finally into and beyond the wild cemetery. He
argues that Romantic period writers use language that ultimately
betrays itself in beastly disruptions exposing anxiety over what it
means to be human, what happens at death, the consequences of
living together, and the significance of being remembered.
Extending his discussion past an emphasis on animal rights to an
examination of animals in their social context, Pielak shows that
these animal representations are both inherently important and a
foreshadowing of the ways we continue to need images of dead and
deadly Romantic beasts.
This book sustains a critical glance at the ways in which we attend
to the corpse, tracing a trajectory from encounter toward
considering options for disposal: veneered mortuary internment,
green burial and its attendant rot, cremation and alkaline
hydrolysis, donation and display, and ecological burial. Through
tracing the possible futures of the dead that haunt the living,
through both the stories that we tell and physical manifestations
following the end of life, we expose the workings of aesthetics
that shape corpses, as well as the ways in which corpses spill
over, resisting aestheticization. This book creates a space for
ritualized practices surrounding death: corpse disposal; corpse
aesthetics that shape both practices attendant upon and
representations of the corpse; and literary, figural, and cultural
representations that deploy these practices to tell a story about
dead bodies-about their separation from the living, about their
disposability, and ultimately about the living who survive the
dead, if only for a while. There is an aesthetics of erasure
persistently at work on the dead body. It must be quickly hidden
from sight to shield us from the certain trauma of our own demise,
or so the unspoken argument goes. Experts-scientists, forensic
specialists, death-care professionals, and law enforcement-are the
only ones qualified to view the dead for any extended period of
time. The rest of us, with only brief doses, inoculate ourselves
from the materiality of death in complex and highly ritualized
ceremonies. Beyond participating in the project of restoring our
sense of finitude, we try to make sense of the untouchable,
unviewable, haunting, and taboo presence of the corpse itself.
Zombies are upon us as never before. So what should we do about it?
Recent zombie apocalypses on the screen and page reshape our
understanding of the walking dead and ourselves; we find that all
bets are off in the case of apocalypse. The undead have begun to
mirror our cultural fears of ourselves, always demanding a
response, exposing our weaknesses, chewing social rules. Whether we
fear the unknown of space, governmental control, lawlessness, or
interpersonal relationships, zombies are there. Even now we live
with intense nostalgia, longing for a simple time before the
beginning of apocalypse even as we imaginatively create ever more
complex and horrifying versions of postapocalyptic life. With this
thin veneer covering our real fears in mind, the focal points of
zombie criticism shift toward cause and cure. This ultimately
spotlights a way forward: possible cures for the zombies that ail
us. For students, critics, and zombie aficionados, we offer
responses to the end of the world as we know it. Along the way, we
argue that the traditional evolutionary model of interpreting
zombies is not enough; we must also chase zombies from advent
through destruction and toward reintegration as we learn to live
alongside them.
This book takes a critical glance at the ways in which we attend to
the corpse, tracing a trajectory from encounter toward considering
options for disposal: veneered mortuary internment, green burial
and its attendant rot, cremation and alkaline hydrolysis, donation
and display, and ecological burial. Through tracing the possible
futures of the dead that haunt the living, through both the stories
that we tell and physical manifestations following the end of life,
we expose the workings of aesthetics that shape corpses, as well as
the ways in which corpses spill over, resisting aestheticization.
This book creates a space for ritualized practices surrounding
death: corpse disposal; corpse aesthetics that shape both practices
attendant upon and representations of the corpse; and literary,
figural, and cultural representations that deploy these practices
to tell a story about dead bodies-about their separation from the
living, about their disposability, and ultimately about the living
who survive the dead, if only for a while. There is an aesthetics
of erasure persistently at work on the dead body. It must be
quickly hidden from sight to shield us from the certain trauma of
our own demise, or so the unspoken argument goes.
Experts-scientists, forensic specialists, death-care professionals,
and law enforcement-are the only ones qualified to view the dead
for any extended period of time. The rest of us, with only brief
doses, inoculate ourselves from the materiality of death in complex
and highly ritualized ceremonies. Beyond participating in the
project of restoring our sense of finitude, we try to make sense of
the untouchable, unviewable, haunting, and taboo presence of the
corpse itself.
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