Bücher der Reihe Emerald Studies in Dealth and Culture Book Set (2018-2019)

This book examines the shifts that have taken place in the funeral industry since 1900, focusing on the figure of the undertaker and exploring how organizational change and attempts to gain recognition as a professional service provider saw the role morph into that of 'funeral director'.

Within popular culture, death is not the end, but instead a space where the dead can exert agency whilst entertaining the consumer. Popular culture enables the dead to be consumed by the living on a mass global scale, actively engaging them with issues of mortality. This book develops the sociological intersectionality between death, the dead and popular culture by examining the agency of the dead. Drawing upon the posthumous careers of the celebrity dead and organ transplantation mythology in popular culture the dead are shown to not be hampered by death but to benefit from the symbolic and economic value they can generate. Meanwhile the fictional dead - the Undead and the dead in crime drama - are conceptualised through morbid sensibility and morbid space to mobilise consumer consideration of mortality and even challenge the public wisdom that contemporary Western society is in death denial and that death is taboo.Death and the dead, within the parameters of popular culture, form a palatable and normative bridge between viewers and mortality, iterating the innate value and hidden depths of popular culture in the study of contemporary society.This book will be of interest to anybody who researches death, popular culture and questions of mortality.

How can we understand the relationship between death and heritage? Using three case studies, Death, Memorialization and Deviant Spaces adapts contemporary spatial theory to develop a new conceptual toolbox, complementing existing work on dark tourism and difficult heritage, to explore the multifarious ways that memorialization functions.

This edited collection investigates metal music's enduring fascination with the medieval period from a variety of critical perspectives, exploring how metal musicians and fans use the medieval period as a fount for creativity and critique.

What role do man-eating monsters - vampires, zombies, werewolves and cannibals - play in contemporary culture? This book explores the question of whether recent representations of humans as food in popular culture characterizes a unique moment in Western cultural history and suggests a new set of attitudes toward people, monsters, and death.