Share the story of what Open Access means to you

University of Michigan needs your feedback to better understand how readers are using openly available ebooks. You can help by taking a short, privacy-friendly survey.
The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture
Dina KhapaevaThis book links the mounting demand for images of violent death with dramatic changes in death-related social rituals. It offers a conceptual framework that connects observations of fictional worlds—including The Twilight Saga, The Vampire Diaries, and the Harry Potter series—with real-world sociocultural practices, analyzing the aesthetic, intellectual, and historical underpinnings of the cult of death. It also places the celebration of death in the context of a longstanding critique of humanism and investigates the role played by 20th-century French theory, posthumanism, transhumanism, and the animal rights movement in shaping the current antihumanist atmosphere.
This timely, thought-provoking book will appeal to scholars of culture, film, literature, anthropology, and American and Russian studies, as well as general readers seeking to understand a defining phenomenon of our age.

- 978-0-472-12262-2 (ebook)
- 978-0-472-13026-9 (hardcover)
- 978-0-472-03894-7 (paper)