Over her dead body : death, femininity and the aesthetic
The argument that this book presents is that narrative and visual representations of death can be read as symptoms of our culture and because the feminine body is culturally constructed as the superlative site of "other" and "not me", culture uses art to dream the deaths of beautiful women
Print Book, English, 1992
Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK, 1992
xvii, 460 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780719037092, 9780719038273, 0719037093, 0719038278
26980651
pt. 1. Death: the epitome of tropes. Preparation for an autopsy
The lady vanishes
Violence of representation
representation of violence
pt. 2. From animate body to inanimate text. The 'most' poetic topic
Deathbed scenes
Bodies on display
The lady is a portrait
Noli me videre
pt. 3. Strategies of translation, mitigation and exchange. Sacrificing extremity
Femininity: missing in action
Close encounters of a fatal kind
pt. 4. Stabilising the ambivalence of repetition
The speculated woman
Rigor has set in: the wasted bride
Necromancy, or closing the crack on the gravestone
Risky resemblances
Spectral stories
The dead beloved as muse
Conclusion: Aporias of resistance