This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.
This volume provides a series of illuminating perspectives on the timings of death, through in-depth studies of Shakespearean tragedy, criminal execution, embalming practices, fears of premature burial, rumours of Adolf Hitler’s survival, and the legal concept of brain death. In doing so, it explores a number of questions, including: how do we know if someone is dead or not? What do people experience at the moment when they die? Is death simply a biological event that comes about in temporal stages of decomposition, or is it a social event defined through cultures, practices, and commemorations? In other words, when exactly is death? Taken together, these contributions explore how death emerges in a series of stages that are uncertain, paradoxical, and socially contested.
Chapter 1. Introduction; Shane McCorristine.- Chapter 2. Being Dead in Shakespearean Tragedy; Mary Ann Lund.- Chapter 3. 'A Candidate for Immortality’: Martyrdom, Memory, and the Marquis of Montrose; Rachel Bennett.- Chapter 4. Overcoming Death: Conserving the Body in Nineteenth-Century Belgium; Veronique Deblon and Kaat Wils.- Chapter 5. Premature Burial and the Undertakers; Brian Parsons.- Chapter 6. The Death of Nazism? Investigating Hitler’s Remains and Survival Rumours in Post-War Germany; Caroline Sharples.- Chapter 7. Death’s Impossible Date; Douglas J. Davies.- Chapter 8. The Legal Definition of Death and the Right to Life; Elizabeth Wicks.- Chapter 9. The Last Moment; Jonathan Rée.- Chapter 10. Afterword; Thomas W. Laqueur.- Index.
