Death in Contemporary Popular Culture

Adriana Teodorescu is Associate Lecturer in the Faculty of Sociology at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. She is the editor of Death within the Text: Social, Philosophical and Aesthetic Approaches to Literature, Death Representations in Literature. Forms and Theories and co-editor of Dying and Death in 18th–21st Century Europe and Dying and Death in 18th–21st Century Europe: Volume 2 . Michael Hviid Jacobsen is Professor of Sociology at Aalborg University, Denmark. He is the editor of The Poetics of Crime and Postmortal Society and co-editor of The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman, Encountering the Everyday, The Transformation of Modernity, Utopia: Social Theory and the Future, Liquid Criminology , Emotions and Crime: Towards a Criminology of the Emotions, Exploring Grief: Towards a Sociology of Sorrow, and Imaginative Methodologies: The Poetic Imagination in the Social Sciences.

List of Contributors; Preface and acknowledgement; Introduction: Death as a Topic in Contemporary Popular Culture; Part 1: Collective attitudes towards and responses to death and mortality; 1. Thoughts for the Times on the Death Taboo: Trivialisation, Tivolisation and Re-Domestication in the Age of Spectacular Death; 2. A Stark and Lonely Death’: Representations of Dying Alone in Popular Culture; 3. Celebrity Deaths and the Thanatological Imagination; 4. The Penguin and the Wahine; Shipwrecks, Resilience and Popular Culture; Part 2: Aesthetical aspects and mythical structures; 5. Healing Comes from Paradise: Illness, Cures and the Staving Off of Death in Naturist Remedies Advertising; 6. The Aesthetics of Corpses in Popular Culture; 7. Into the Dark Side of Pop Art - From Warhol to Banksy; 8. Towards a Cultural Theory of Killing: The Event of Killing in Quentin Tarantino’s Movies; Part 3: Death as a significant narrative device; 9. ‘The Radio Said: "There’s Another Shot Dead"’: Popular Culture, ‘Rebel’ Songs and Death in Irish Memory; 10. Locating Death in Children’s Animated Films; 11. Death in Don Delillo’s White Noise: A Literary Diagnosis of Contemporary Death Culture; 12. Narratives of Death and Immortality in the ‘Islamic State’ Discourse on Twitter; Index