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Losing Our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture
Paperback
Literary CriticismDeath & DyingGeneral Sociology
ISBN13: 9780814742709
Publisher: New York Univ Pr
Published: Aug 1 2005
Pages: 255
Weight: 0.81
Height: 0.64 Width: 6.04 Depth: 8.92
Language: English
What is the fascination that decollation holds for us, as individuals and as a culture? Why does the idea make us laugh and the act make us close our eyes? Losing Our Heads explores in both artistic and cultural contexts the role of the chopped-off head. It asks why the practice of decapitation was once so widespread, why it has diminished--but not, as scenes from contemporary Iraq show, completely disappeared--and why we find it so peculiarly repulsive that we use it as a principal marker to separate ourselves from a more barbaricor primitive past?
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