"Aside from its perfect fit of critic and subject, Laurence A. Rickels's book provides the most thorough and exhaustive reading of Philip K. Dick's literary work that exists. He goes through all the novels literally, both the science fiction works and the so-called mainstream novels Dick did not publish in his lifetime. The reader of science fiction should welcome a book like this, which is both knowledgeable of the SF tradition tradition and creatively analytical. I could not put this book down once I began to read it".---George Slusser, University of California, Riverside --

Focusing on the necrophilic dimension of Pound's poetry and the inflections of materiality enabled by the modernist image, Tiffany finds a continuum between Decadent practice and the avant-garde, between the image's prehistory and its political afterlife, between the "corpse language" of Victorian poetry and a conception of the "radioactive" image

This study explores Proust’s answers to some of the fundamental challenges of the inevitable human experience of mourning. Thinking mourning and creativity together allows for a fresh approach to the modernist novel at large, but also calls for a reassessment of the particular historical and social challenges faced by mourners at the beginning of the twentieth century. The book enables the reader to acknowledge loss and forgetting as an essential part of memory, and it proposes that this literary topos has seminal implications for an understanding of the ethics, aesthetics, and erotic in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Drawing on the works of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida, Anna Magdalena Elsner develops an original theory of how mourning and creativity are linked by emphasizing that ethical dilemmas are central to an understanding of the novel’s final aesthetic apotheosis. This sheds new light on the enigmatic and versatile nature of mourning but also pays tribute to those fertile tensions and paradoxes that have made Proust’s novel captivating for readers since its publication.

While grief is suffered in all cultures, it is expressed differently all over the world in accordance with local customs and beliefs. Music has been associated with the healing of grief for many centuries, with Homer prescribing music as an antidote to sorrow as early as the 7th Century BC. The changing role of music in expressions of grief and mourning throughout history and in different cultures reflects the changing attitudes of society towards life and death itself. This volume investigates the role of music in mourning rituals across time and culture, discussing the subject from the multiple perspectives of music history, music psychology, ethnomusicology and music therapy.

Examining our unresolved relationship with death.

Featuring fresh and fascinating contributions from leading thinkers and theorists, Contested Bodies brings together a number of different accounts and perspectives on the body, drawing out some of the key connections and disjunctures from this most contested of topics.