This compelling book brings together physicians, artists, and scholars of film, literature, philosophy, art, and politics to discuss the representation of the corpse in Western culture. Spanning a timeline from the Renaissance to the present, these essays introduce readers to a modern autopsy, a public execution and dissection in seventeenth-century England, the genre of postmortem photography, the corpse as artist's model, images of dead women in such popular films as "Copycat" and "The Silence of the Lambs," and post-mortem scenes in the works of Flaubert, Balzac, Andres Serrano, and others.

Elizabeth Klaver is associate professor of English at Southern Illinois University and author of Performing Television: Contemporary Drama and the Media Culture.