Dead Europe

Author: Christos Tsiolkas
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd
ISBN: 0857895648
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 425

Book Description
From the international bestselling and Booker Prize nominated author of The Slap comes a blazingly brilliant new novel. Winner of the 2006 Age Fiction Prize Winner of the 2006 Melbourne Best Writing Award Part long-forgotten myth, part meditation on the violence and tragedy of contemporary Europe, Dead Europe is an unsettling story about blood lust and blood revenge; a novel of blazing brilliance from the acclaimed author of The Slap. Isaac, a young Australian photographer, is travelling through Europe. His whole life he has longed for the sophistication and wealth of the Europe of his father's stories, the Europe at the centre of civilization and culture. But behind the facade of a unified and globalized contemporary society, he finds a history-blasted wasteland, a place forever condemned by the ghosts of its unspeakable past. In the mountain village in the Balkans where his mother was born, he unearths ancient terrors that have not been laid to rest, and perhaps never can be.

The Strange Death of Europe

Author: Douglas Murray
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472942256
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Book Description
THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER A WATERSTONES POLITICS PAPERBACK OF THE YEAR, 2018 The Strange Death of Europe is a highly personal account of a continent and culture caught in the act of suicide. Declining birth-rates, mass immigration and cultivated self-distrust and self-hatred have come together to make Europeans unable to argue for themselves and incapable of resisting their own comprehensive change as a society. This book is not only an analysis of demographic and political realities, but also an eyewitness account of a continent in self-destruct mode. It includes reporting from across the entire continent, from the places where migrants land to the places they end up, from the people who appear to welcome them in to the places which cannot accept them. Told from this first-hand perspective, and backed with impressive research and evidence, the book addresses the disappointing failure of multiculturalism, Angela Merkel's U-turn on migration, the lack of repatriation and the Western fixation on guilt. Murray travels to Berlin, Paris, Scandinavia, Lampedusa and Greece to uncover the malaise at the very heart of the European culture, and to hear the stories of those who have arrived in Europe from far away. In each chapter he also takes a step back to look at the bigger issues which lie behind a continent's death-wish, answering the question of why anyone, let alone an entire civilisation, would do this to themselves? He ends with two visions of Europe – one hopeful, one pessimistic – which paint a picture of Europe in crisis and offer a choice as to what, if anything, we can do next.

Dead Lovers

Author: Basil Dufallo
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472115600
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Book Description
Explores the variety of bonds that are formed between writers and the figure of the dead lover

Death in Medieval Europe

Author: Joelle Rollo-Koster
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1315466848
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
Death in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death Choreographed explores new cultural research into death and funeral practices in medieval Europe and demonstrates the important relationship between death and the world of the living in the middle ages. This volume explores overarching topics such as burials, commemorations, revenants, mourning practices and funerals, capital punishment, suspiscious death and death registrations using case studies from across Europe including England, Iceland and Spain. Drawing together and building upon the latest scholarship, this book is essential reading for all students and academics of death in the medieval period.

The Place of the Dead

Author: Bruce Gordon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521645188
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
This volume of essays provides a comprehensive treatment of a very significant component of the societies of late medieval and early modern Europe: the dead. It argues that to contemporaries the 'placing' of the dead, in physical, spiritual and social terms, was a vitally important exercise, and one which often involved conflict and complex negotiation. The contributions range widely geographically, from Scotland to Transylvania, and address a spectrum of themes: attitudes towards the corpse, patterns of burial, forms of commemoration, the treatment of dead infants, the nature of the afterlife and ghosts. Individually the essays help to illuminate several current historiographical concerns: the significance of the Black Death, the impact of the protestant and catholic Reformations, and interactions between 'elite' and 'popular' culture. Collectively, by exploring the social and cultural meanings of attitudes towards the dead, they provide insight into the way these past societies understood themselves.

Dealing With The Dead

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004358331
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 461

Book Description
Death was a constant, visible presence in medieval and renaissance Europe. Yet, the acknowledgement of death did not necessarily amount to an acceptance of its finality. Whether they were commoners, clergy, aristocrats, or kings, the dead continued to function literally as integrated members of their communities long after they were laid to rest in their graves. From stories of revenants bringing pleas from Purgatory to the living, to the practical uses and regulation of burial space; from the tradition of the ars moriendi, to the depiction of death on the stage; and from the making of martyrs, to funerals for the rich and poor, this volume examines how communities dealt with their dead as continual, albeit non-living members. Contributors are Jill Clements, Libby Escobedo, Hilary Fox, Sonsoles Garcia, Stephen Gordon, Melissa Herman, Mary Leech, Nikki Malain, Kathryn Maud, Justin Noetzel, Anthony Perron, Martina Saltamacchia, Thea Tomaini, Wendy Turner, and Christina Welch

Afterlives

Author: Nancy Mandeville Caciola
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501703463
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Book Description
Simultaneously real and unreal, the dead are people, yet they are not. The society of medieval Europe developed a rich set of imaginative traditions about death and the afterlife, using the dead as a point of entry for thinking about the self, regeneration, and loss. These macabre preoccupations are evident in the widespread popularity of stories about the returned dead, who interacted with the living both as disembodied spirits and as living corpses or revenants. In Afterlives, Nancy Mandeville Caciola explores this extraordinary phenomenon of the living's relationship with the dead in Europe during the five hundred years after the year 1000.Caciola considers both Christian and pagan beliefs, showing how certain traditions survived and evolved over time, and how attitudes both diverged and overlapped through different contexts and social strata. As she shows, the intersection of Christian eschatology with various pagan afterlife imaginings—from the classical paganisms of the Mediterranean to the Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, and Scandinavian paganisms indigenous to northern Europe—brought new cultural values about the dead into the Christian fold as Christianity spread across Europe. Indeed, the Church proved surprisingly open to these influences, absorbing new images of death and afterlife in unpredictable fashion. Over time, however, the persistence of regional cultures and beliefs would be counterbalanced by the effects of an increasingly centralized Church hierarchy. Through it all, one thing remained constant: the deep desire in medieval people to bring together the living and the dead into a single community enduring across the generations.

Been Dead, Never Been To Europe

Author: Jon Johnston
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781735888019
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 156

Book Description
Jon Johnston was an active, healthy adult when he dropped dead suddenly of a widowmaker heart attack. He was not expected to live, after being dead for more than 20 minutes, but if he did survive, his brain would forever be damaged due to oxygen deprivation.Alternating between humor, sadness, and anger at his body's betrayal, Jon takes us with him as he puts his life back together. At the beginning, he sees the trauma as a minor inconvenience and expects a speedy recovery. As he realizes the damage to his heart is permanent, he is hit with another setback when he is diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury, leaving him with memory loss, debilitating headaches, and a loss of identity. Tasks that had been trivial had become onerous endeavors, and his life became an unexpected challenge.Been Dead, Never Been to Europe offers a real-life view of what it takes to rebuild after a devastating event, to accept an unexpected present and future, and to discover a new identity. Been Dead, Never Been to Europe will appeal to readers who seek memoirs of resilience, and to those whose own lives have been affected by unexpected trauma.

People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

Author: Dara Horn
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393531570
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
Winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Wall Street Journal, Chicago Public Library, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living. Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager. Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture—and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks—Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones. In these essays, Horn reflects on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the mythology that Jewish family names were changed at Ellis Island, the blockbuster traveling exhibition Auschwitz, the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China, and the little-known life of the "righteous Gentile" Varian Fry. Throughout, she challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present. Horn draws upon her travels, her research, and also her own family life—trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious ten-year-old, her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks in her children’s school, the profound perspective offered by traditional religious practice and study—to assert the vitality, complexity, and depth of Jewish life against an antisemitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of "Never forget," is on the rise. As Horn explores the (not so) shocking attacks on the American Jewish community in recent years, she reveals the subtler dehumanization built into the public piety that surrounds the Jewish past—making the radical argument that the benign reverence we give to past horrors is itself a profound affront to human dignity.

The Political Lives of Dead Bodies

Author: Katherine Verdery
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231500432
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Book Description
Since 1989, scores of bodies across Eastern Europe have been exhumed and brought to rest in new gravesites. Katherine Verdery investigates why certain corpses—the bodies of revolutionary leaders, heroes, artists, and other luminaries, as well as more humble folk—have taken on a political life in the turbulent times following the end of Communist Party rule, and what roles they play in revising the past and reorienting the present. Enlivening and invigorating the dialogue on postsocialist politics, this imaginative study helps us understand the dynamic and deeply symbolic nature of politics—and how it can breathe new life into old bones.