An interdisciplinary collection of essays on the medical and social articulation of death, this anthology considers to what extent a subject as elusive as death can be examined. Though it touches us all, we can perceive it only in life - with the predictable result that we treat it either as a clinical or social problem to be managed or as a phenomenon to be studied quantitatively. This volume goes beyond these models to question self-reflexively how the management of death is organized and motivated and the ways that death is at once feared and embraced. Drawing on the very latest in the medical humanities, Spectacular Death gives us an enlightening new perspective on death from the classical world to the twenty-first century.

Tristanne Connolly is associate professor at St. Jerome's University in the University of Waterloo, Canada.

Introduction - Tristanne Connolly

Classical Death: Comedy and Tragedy - Tristanne Connolly

Life, Death, and the In-Between: The Duck-Rabbit / The Face of the Clown - Alan Blum

The Illness of Hope, the Cure of Truth and the Difference of Principle: A Reflexive Analysis of Antigone's and Meursault's Confrontation with Death  - Kieran Bonner

Enlightenment and Romanticism: Aestheticizing the Corpse - Tristanne Connolly

Reflexive Vectors: Art, Anatomy and Death in Cowper and Gamelin - Morgan Tunzelmann

"Mother of Unworthy Woe": Infant Death and Sentimental Maternity in British Romantic Women's Poetry and Midwifery Books - Tristanne Connolly

Speaking of Death: Remembrance and Lamentation - Jan Plecash

Memorialization and the City - Tristanne Connolly

Enjoyment's Petrification: The Luxor Obelisk in a Melancholic Century - Mike Follert

Barcelona, In Memoriam: The Tension between Urban Renovation and The Past - Marta Marín-Dòmine

Jewish Victims and German Youth: Questions of Pedagogy and Responsibility at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp - Elke Grenzer

X Marks the Spot: New Orleans Under Erasure - Kevin Dowler

Life and Death in New Orleans: Disaster Tours Imagined - Stephen Svenson and Cory Ruf

Policy: Border Control between Life and Death - Tristanne Connolly

Hope and resignation in medical care: when doctors go to court to terminate patient treatment - Diego Llovet

Life-threatening (anaphylactic) food allergies: School life, health and well-being - Saeed Hydaralli

Live Deaths and Afterlives - Tristanne Connolly

Game Death: Fantasy and Mastery in Scenario Paintball - Ariane Hanemaayer

Delirious Exhibitionism: Negotiating Technologies in Timothy Leary's Live Death - Elizabeth C. Effinger

How the Dead Circulate (In Life) - Peter McHugh