Chase Pielak - Böcker

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.

Depictions of the zombie apocalypse continue to reshape our concept of the walking dead (and of ourselves). The undead mirror cultural fears--governmental control, lawlessness, even interpersonal relationships--exposing our weaknesses and demanding a response (or safeguard), even as we imagine ever more horrifying versions of post-apocalyptic life. This critical study traces a shift in narrative focus in portrayals of the zombie apocalypse, as the living move from surviving hypothetical destruction toward reintegration and learning to live with the undead.

What if one of literature's greatest poets was actually a zombie, writing in an Elizabethan world teeming with the undead hiding in plain sight? Inviting readers to see the sublime in the looming apocalypse, this book presents all 154 Shakespearean sonnets (with minor alterations transfigured into "zonnets") in their horrifying glory, highlighting transcendent themes of love, death, beauty and feasting on the flesh of the living. Each sonnet portrays a zombie encounter, with accompanying vignettes revealing the struggles of undead life in early modern England. Original illustrations by Anna Pagnucci bring the nightmare to life. Shakespeare will never be the same.

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.