Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture

Jonathan Dollimore is Professor in the School of English and American Studies at the University of Sussex. He is author of the critically acclaimed Sexual Dissidence.

"Prodigiously intelligent, deeply challenging and ultimately rewarding..." -- Publishers Weekly"This is a work of breath-taking scope and reach. ...impressive command of sources and penetrating vision..." -- Theological Studies"...this immensely wide-ranging account repays careful study." -- Library Journal"...an impressively versatile survey... Death, Desire andLoss in Western Culture is a boldly transhistorical book from one who would lay claim to the title of cultural materialist." -- London Review of Books"In [Dollimore's] engaging study of death and its corresponding link to desire. . . . he offers a substantial contribution to Western intellectual history. . . . Dollimore presents a marvelous, enrapturing, and accessible work for both the scholar and the armchair philosopher." -- Booklist, starred review"This will be an important book for all those engaged in cultural criticism. Highly recommended for upper-division undergraduates through faculty, and for general readers." -- Choice"The union of thanatos and eros is a central topos of Western literature. Jonathan Dollimore has drawn upon this compelling theme as the scaffolding upon which to construct nothing less than a history of Western culture, from the Greeks and the Hebrew Bible, to our society's most urgent confrontation with AIDS. Monumental in conception and magisterial in execution, Death, Desireand Loss is an original and provocative meditation on the history of Western thought, and on one of the most sublime themes." -- Henry Louis Gates, Jr."Another brilliant accomplishment from one of Britain's foremost theorists of literature and sexuality. This is a superb reading of philosophies of death and structures of desire, classical, early modern and postmodern. An important and compelling book that speaks to key issues of our time." -- Marjorie Garber"Probing and perceptive, Death, Desire and Loss in WesternCulture is truly a tour de force." -- Roy Porter"[Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture] throws fascinating light on the way we have been living and loving and dying for the last two and a half millennia.""Dollimore's reach is vast.." -- Richard McCoy, Winter 2000

• Introduction. I Ancient World. II Mutability, Melancholy and Quest: The Renaissance. III Social Death. IV Modernity and Philosophy: The Authenticity of Nothingness. V The Desire Not To Be: Late Metaphysics and Psychoanalysis. VI Renouncing Death. VII The Aesthetics of Energy. VIII Death and The Homoerotic. Notes. Bibliography. Index.