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Author | : Frances Larson |
Publisher | : Granta Books |
Total Pages | : |
Release | : 2014-11-06 |
Genre | : History |
ISBN | : 1847088015 |
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Our history is littered with heads. Over the centuries, they have decorated our churches, festooned our city walls and filled our museums; they have been props for artists and specimens for laboratory scientists, trophies for soldiers and items of barter. Today, as videos of decapitations circulate online and cryonicists promise that our heads may one day live on without our bodies, the severed head is as contentious and compelling as ever. From shrunken heads to trophies of war; from memento mori to Damien Hirst's With Dead Head; from grave-robbing phrenologists to enterprising scientists, Larson explores the bizarre, often gruesome and confounding history of the severed head. Its story is our story.
Author | : Frances Larson |
Publisher | : W. W. Norton & Company |
Total Pages | : 336 |
Release | : 2014-11-17 |
Genre | : History |
ISBN | : 0871404958 |
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A “wide-ranging and thoughtful” (Wall Street Journal) exploration of the varied obsessions that the “civilized West” has had with decapitated heads and skulls. The human head is exceptional. It accommodates four of our five senses, encases the brain, and boasts the most expressive set of muscles in the body. It is our most distinctive attribute and connects our inner selves to the outer world. Yet there is a dark side to the head’s preeminence, one that has, in the course of human history, manifested itself in everything from decapitation to headhunting. So explains anthropologist Frances Larson in this fascinating history of decapitated human heads. From the Western collectors whose demand for shrunken heads spurred massacres to Second World War soldiers who sent the remains of the Japanese home to their girlfriends, from Madame Tussaud modeling the guillotined head of Robespierre to Damien Hirst photographing decapitated heads in city morgues, from grave-robbing phrenologists to skull-obsessed scientists, Larson explores our macabre fixation with severed heads.
Author | : Julia Kristeva |
Publisher | : Columbia University Press |
Total Pages | : 208 |
Release | : 2012 |
Genre | : Art |
ISBN | : 0231157207 |
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Renowned philosopher and cultural theorist Kristeva (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection) offers an extended consideration of artistic figurations of the severed head, the organizing theme to an exhibition she coordinated at the Louvre in 1998. Though she follows a single historical trajectory, moving from Paleolithic skull cults to antique Greek sculpture to the Surrealist drawings, Kristeva eschews the disciplinary constraints of art history, instead employing psychoanalysis to explore the intertwined problems of representation and mortality posed by the severed head. For Kristeva, the capacity to figure the life of the mind first requires a confrontation with this horrific object that stands at the boundary between life and death, registering not only the loss of corporeal form but also subjective interiority. Though this book does not engage with recent images of decapitation, it is not without contemporary political-cultural import; for Kristeva, these cruel artistic figurations offer us the capacity to contemplate the sacred within a technology-driven contemporary visual culture. Verdict While a challenging text, this beautifully written and richly layered meditation on mortality and representation will undoubtedly appeal to those readers interested in semiotic and psychoanalytically informed readings of art.-Jonathan Patkowski, CUNY Graduate Ctr.(c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Author | : Iris Murdoch |
Publisher | : Samuel French , Limited |
Total Pages | : 78 |
Release | : 2015-09-23 |
Genre | : Drama |
ISBN | : 9780573015274 |
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JB Priestley's adaptation of Iris Murdoch's A Severed Head.4 women, 3 men
Author | : Regina Janes |
Publisher | : NYU Press |
Total Pages | : 255 |
Release | : 2005-08-01 |
Genre | : Literary Criticism |
ISBN | : 0814743013 |
Download Losing Our Heads Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
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 “barbaric”or “primitive” past? Although the topic is grim, Regina Janes’s treatment and conclusions are neither grisly nor gruesome, but continuously instructive about the ironies of humanity’s cultural nature. Bringing to bear an array of evidence, the book argues that the human ability to create meaning from the body motivates the practice of decapitation, its diminution, the impossibility of its extirpation, and its continuing fascination. Ranging from antiquity to the late nineteenth-century passion for Salomé and John the Baptist, and from the enlightenment to postcolonial Africa’s challenge to the severed head as sign of barbarism, Losing Our Heads opens new areas of investigation, enabling readers to understand the shock of decapitation and to see the value in moving past shock to analysis. Written with penetrating wit and featuring striking illustrations, it is sure to captivate anyone interested in his or her head.
Author | : Patricia Palmer |
Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | : 197 |
Release | : 2014 |
Genre | : History |
ISBN | : 1107041848 |
Download The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
This book explores actual and literary depictions of beheadings in sixteenth-century Ireland and addresses how violence is transcribed into art.
Author | : Larissa Tracy |
Publisher | : BRILL |
Total Pages | : 387 |
Release | : 2012-01-20 |
Genre | : Literary Criticism |
ISBN | : 9004211551 |
Download Heads Will Roll Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
Capitalizing upon the enduring fascination with decapitation in European culture, this collection examines--through a variety of critical lenses--the recurring "roles/rolls" of severed human heads in the medieval and early modern imagination.
Author | : Robert Olen Butler |
Publisher | : Chronicle Books |
Total Pages | : 274 |
Release | : 2006-08-10 |
Genre | : Fiction |
ISBN | : 9780811856140 |
Download Severance Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
Pulitzer-winning Butler presents 62 stories, each exactly 240 words long, capturing the flow of thoughts and feelings that go through a person's mind after their head has been severed. The characters are both real and imagined, including Medusa and Anne Boleyn.
Author | : Bess Lovejoy |
Publisher | : Simon and Schuster |
Total Pages | : 344 |
Release | : 2013-03-12 |
Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | : 1451654987 |
Download Rest in Pieces Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
For some of the most influential figures in history, death marked the start of a new adventure. The famous deceased have been stolen, burned, sold, pickled, frozen, stuffed, impersonated, and even filed away in a lawyer's office. Their fingers, teeth, toes, arms, legs, skulls, hearts, lungs, and nether regions have embarked on voyages that crisscross the globe and stretch the imagination.
Author | : Rita Dolce |
Publisher | : Routledge |
Total Pages | : 92 |
Release | : 2017-12-15 |
Genre | : History |
ISBN | : 1351657097 |
Download Losing One's Head in the Ancient Near East Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
In the Ancient Near East, cutting off someone’s head was a unique act, not comparable to other types of mutilation, and therefore charged with a special symbolic and communicative significance. This book examines representations of decapitation in both images and texts, particularly in the context of war, from a trans-chronological perspective that aims to shed light on some of the conditions, relationships and meanings of this specific act. The severed head is a “coveted object” for the many individuals who interact with it and determine its fate, and the act itself appears to take on the hallmarks of a ritual. Drawing mainly on the evidence from Anatolia, Syria and Mesopotamia between the third and first millennia BC, and with reference to examples from prehistory to the Neo-Assyrian Period, this fascinating study will be of interest not only to art historians, but to anyone interested in the dynamics of war in the ancient world.