Death within the Text: Social, Philosophical and Aesthetic Approaches to Literature

Product Description The book tackles the challenging theme of death as seen through the lens of literature and its connections with history, the visual arts, anthropology, philosophy and other fields in humanities. It searches for answers to three questions: what can we know about death; how is death socialised; and how and for which purposes is death aesthetically shaped? Unlike many other publications, the volume does not endorse the fallacy of over-simplifying death by seeing it either in an exclusively positive light or by reducing it to a purely literary figure. Using literatures potential to stimulate critical thinking, many contemporary stereotypical configurations of death and dying are debunked, and many hitherto unforeseen ways in which death functions as a complex trigger of meaning-making are revealed. The book proves that death is an inexhaustible source of meanings which should be understood as peremptorily plural, discontinuous, problematic, competitive, and often conflictual. It offers original contributions to the field of death studies and also to literary and cultural studies. About the Author Adriana Teodorescu holds a PhD in Comparative Literature, and is Associate Lecturer at the Faculty of Sociology of Babe-Bolyai University, Romania. In 2016, she organized a seminar at Harvard University on death in literature, as part of the American Comparative Literature Association's Annual Meeting. She has been co-organizer of the annual International Conference on Dying and Death in 18th-21st Century Europe since 2010. She is the editor of Death Representations in Literature. Forms and Theories (2015) and co-editor of the Dying and Death in 18th-21st Century Europe volumes (2011 and 2014). Her most recent publications include The Contemporary Imaginary of Work. Symbolic Immortality within the Postmodern Corporate Discourse, in Postmortal Society: Towards a Sociology of Immortality (2017) and The Women-Nature Connection as a Key Element in the Social Construction of Western Contemporary Motherhood, in Women and Nature? Beyond Dualism in Gender, Body, and Environment (2017).