Emerald Studies in Death and Culture – serie

Within popular culture, death is not the end, but instead a space where the dead can exert agency whilst entertaining the consumer. Popular culture enables the dead to be consumed by the living on a mass global scale, actively engaging them with issues of mortality. This book develops the sociological intersectionality between death, the dead and popular culture by examining the agency of the dead. Drawing upon the posthumous careers of the celebrity dead and organ transplantation mythology in popular culture the dead are shown to not be hampered by death but to benefit from the symbolic and economic value they can generate. Meanwhile the fictional dead – the Undead and the dead in crime drama – are conceptualised through morbid sensibility and morbid space to mobilise consumer consideration of mortality and even challenge the public wisdom that contemporary Western society is in death denial and that death is taboo.  Death and the dead, within the parameters of popular culture, form a palatable and normative bridge between viewers and mortality, iterating the innate value and hidden depths of popular culture in the study of contemporary society. This book will be of interest to anybody who researches death, popular culture and questions of mortality.

In response to increased academic interest in the fields of death studies, memorial studies, and human and animal studies, Skin, Meaning and Symbolism in Pet Memorials examines the mourning rituals which exist between people and their domestic pets. Paying close attention to the changing role and increased prominence of the companion animal in the domestic setting, each chapter considers a different form of companion animal memorialization, linking modern practices such as tattooing to historical examples of animal focused memento mori, particularly taxidermy. The final chapter adopts a forward focus in its provision of a framework for future studies related to how death and memorialization rituals are increasingly coming to occupy the digital space. While skin and touch are the focal points of many encounters explored in the text, what becomes evident is how the virtual realm is increasingly intruding into the touch experience. As a result, the posthumous, online afterlives of pets are set to become a social issue of increasing significance to the death and mourning experience.  This work meets the needs of academics, post-graduate students and general readers alike, appealing to anyone with an interest in death studies, popular culture, tattooing and human and animal studies.

This book offers an ethnographic exploration of three sites of infamous atrocity and their differing memorialization. ‘Dark tourism’ research has studied the consumerization of spaces associated with death and barbarity, whilst ‘difficult heritage’ has looked at politicized, national debates that surround the preservation of death. This book contributes to these debates by applying spatial theory on a scalar level, particularly through the work of Henri Lefebvre. It uses escalating case studies to situate memorialization, and the multifarious demands of politics, consumption and community, within a framework that rearticulates ‘lived’, ‘perceived’ and ‘conceived’ aspects of deviant spaces ranging from the small (a bench) to the very large (a city). The first case study, the Tyburn gallows site in York, uses Lefebvre’s notion of ‘theatrical space’ to contextualize the role of performativity in memorialization. The second, Number 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, builds on this by exploring the absence of memorialization through Lefebvre’s concept of ‘contradictory space’ and the impact this has on consumption. The third expands to consider the city as a problematic memorial, here focusing on the political subjectivities of Dresden – rebuilt following the devastation of the Second World War – and its contemporary associations with neo-Nazi and anti-fascist protests. Ultimately, by examining the issue of scale in heritage, the book seeks to develop a new way of unpacking and understanding the heteroglossic nature of deviant space and memorialization.

What role do man-eating monsters - vampires, zombies, werewolves and cannibals - play in contemporary culture? This book explores the question of whether recent representations of humans as food in popular culture characterizes a unique moment in Western cultural history and suggests a new set of attitudes toward people, monsters, animals, and death. This volume analyzes how previous epochs represented man-eating monsters and cannibalism. Cultural taboos across the world are explored and brought into perspective whilst we contemplate how the representations of humans as commodities can create a global atmosphere that creeps towards cannibalism as a norm. This book also explores the links between the role played by the animal rights movement in problematizing the difference between humans and nonhuman animals. Instead of looking at the relations between food, body, and culture, or the ways in which media images of food reach out to various constituencies and audiences, as some existing studies do, this collection is focused on the crucial question, of how and why popular culture representations diffuse the borders between monsters, people, and animals, and how this affects our ideas about what may and may not be eaten.

Death consumes our lives. As such, it is unsurprising that our leisure time, recreational activities and playful exploits are also infatuated with dying, death and the dead. Death, Culture and Leisure offers a playful exploration of the way in which we play with both death and the dead. This inter- and multi-disciplinary work brings together a variety of scholars to consider the nexuses that exist between death, culture and leisure. Edited by Matt Coward-Gibbs, this collection provides an exploration of how our leisure time and playful exploits are interwoven with death. Embracing an array of tensions and contradictions, this book draws on a diverse trajectory of examples ranging from play in the post-Anthropocene to the articulate undead, and from the depictions of death in children's picture books to the playful activism of the death positivity movement. Bringing together debates from thanatology, game studies, sociology, music studies, theatre studies, contemporary literature, religious studies and media studies, this innovative collection offers up a rich assemblage of interdisciplinary voices. This text invites readers to not only consider the diverse ways in which we play dead but also invokes a call to explore the myriad of presentations of death, dying and disposal that exist in leisure environs.