The mass media make it possible for fame to be enhanced and transformed posthumously. What does it mean to fans when a celebrity dies, and how can death change the way that celebrities are perceived and celebrated? How do we mourn and remember? What can different forms of communication reveal about the role of media in our lives? Through a provocative look at the lives and legacy of popular musicians from Elvis to Tupac and from Louis Prima to John Lennon, Afterlife as Afterimage analyzes the process of posthumous fame to give us new insights into the consequences of mediation, and it illuminates the complex nature of fandom, community formation, and identity construction.

This book is an earnest attempt to say something about the modern dilemma. The author's alternatively hilarious and poignant text is an attempt to open the door to answering these questions. Nowhere is it overtly preachy because it opens up new intellectual possibilities for the reader to ponder and complete on their own rather than providing the reader with a top-down instruction manual as to how to live their life. And while our commodity-obsessed culture tends to naturalize its flaws, he points out that there are indeed still possibilities out there beyond a world where buying stuff seems to be the only worthwhile human endeavor. This work attempts to persuade the reader to consider the meaning of the reality he or she is tasked with viewing daily. Is it a solipsistic nightmare or total bliss, neither or both? Will, it ever ends, and how?

Ivan Albright's (1897-1983) rejection of the idealized figure and exposure of the frailty of the human form pushed his work to the edge of contemporaneous practices of art in North America and into the realm of medical illustration, disturbing both the critics and the public. Albright's representation of the metaphysical through the flesh on the canvas was definitively derived from his experience as a medical draftsman in World War I. His use of the skin of his subjects to speak to the trauma and the inevitable death of the human body can be seen throughout his oeuvre, beginning with his drawings in his medical sketchbooks completed during the war. To assist in his metaphysical and spiritual goals for the viewer of his works, Albright developed a painting tool, his color wands. Either through motion or prolonged staring, he hoped the afterimage colors on the canvas would activate the viewer's "subconscious." Spurred on by the growing public awareness of the changing scientific vision at the turn of the century, Albright equipped himself with the ability to reveal larger truths about our world, and worked to uncover the mystery that is color.

A Dictionary of Hallucinations is designed to serve as a reference manual for neuroscientists, psychiatrists, psychiatric residents, psychologists, neurologists, historians of psychiatry, general practitioners, and academics dealing professionally with concepts of hallucinations and other sensory deceptions.

This study explores Chaucer's present-day cultural reputation by way of popular culture. In just the past two decades his texts have been adapted to a wide variety of popular genres, including television, stage, comic book, hip-hop, science fiction, horror, romance, and crime fiction. This cultural recycling involves a variety of functions but Chaucer's primary association is with the idea of pilgrimage and the prevailing tenor is populist satire. The target is not only cultural elitism but also the dominant discourse of professional Chaucerians. Academics in turn may have doubts about the value of popular Chaucer; popular culture theory, however, would maintain that such skepticism has less to do with critical discrimination than the assertion of social distinction. Nonetheless, the fact that Chaucer has a popular afterlife, and remains an ideological product over which competing groups lay claim, attests to his current cultural vitality.

The untimely deaths of Amy Winehouse (2011) and Whitney Houston (2012), and the ’resurrection’ of Tupac Shakur for a performance at the Coachella music festival in April 2012, have focused the media spotlight on the relationship between popular music, fame and death. If the phrase ’sex, drugs and rock’n’roll’ ever qualified a lifestyle, it has left many casualties in its wake, and with the ranks of dead musicians growing over time, so the types of death involved and the reactions to them have diversified. Conversely, as many artists who fronted the rock’n’roll revolution of the 1950s and 1960s continue to age, the idea of dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse (which gave rise, for instance, to the myth of the ’27 Club’) no longer carries the same resonance that it once might have done. This edited collection explores the reception of dead rock stars, ’rock’ being taken in the widest sense as the artists discussed belong to the genres of rock’n’roll (Elvis Presley), disco (Donna Summer), pop and pop-rock (Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse), punk and post-punk (GG Allin, Ian Curtis), rap (Tupac Shakur), folk (the Dutchman André Hazes) and ’world’ music (Fela Kuti). When music artists die, their fellow musicians, producers, fans and the media react differently, and this book brings together their intertwining modalities of reception. The commercial impact of death on record sales, copyrights, and print media is considered, and the different justifications by living artists for being involved with the dead, through covers, sampling and tributes. The cultural representation of dead singers is investigated through obituaries, biographies and biopics, observing that posthumous fame provides coping mechanisms for fans, and consumers of popular culture more generally, to deal with the knowledge of their own mortality. Examining the contrasting ways in which male and female dead singers are portrayed in the media, the book

The first book-length study of one of the most essential elements of hip-hop: musical borrowing