This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This volume provides a series of illuminating perspectives on the timings of death, through in-depth studies of Shakespearean tragedy, criminal execution, embalming practices, fears of premature burial, rumours of Adolf Hitler’s survival, and the legal concept of brain death. In doing so, it explores a number of questions, including: how do we know if someone is dead or not? What do people experience at the moment when they die? Is death simply a biological event that comes about in temporal stages of decomposition, or is it a social event defined through cultures, practices, and commemorations? In other words, when exactly is death? Taken together, these contributions explore how death emerges in a series of stages that are uncertain, paradoxical, and socially contested.

This volume provides a series of illuminating perspectives on the timings of death, through in-depth studies of Shakespearean tragedy, criminal execution, embalming practices, fears of premature burial, rumours of Adolf Hitler's survival, and the legal concept of brain death. In doing so, it explores a number of questions, including: how do we know if someone is dead or not? What do people experience at the moment when they die? Is death simply a biological event that comes about in temporal stages of decomposition, or is it a social event defined through cultures, practices, and commemorations? In other words, when exactly is death? Taken together, these contributions explore how death emerges in a series of stages that are uncertain, paradoxical, and socially contested. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

This open access book is the culmination of many years of research on what happened to the bodies of executed criminals in the past. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it looks at the consequences of the 1752 Murder Act. These criminal bodies had a crucial role in the history of medicine, and the history of crime, and great symbolic resonance in literature and popular culture. Starting with a consideration of the criminal corpse in the medieval and early modern periods, chapters go on to review the histories of criminal justice, of medical history and of gibbeting under the Murder Act, and ends with some discussion of the afterlives of the corpse, in literature, folklore and in contemporary medical ethics. Using sophisticated insights from cultural history, archaeology, literature, philosophy and ethics as well as medical and crime history, this book is a uniquely interdisciplinary take on a fascinating historical phenomenon.

Addressing a gap in social science research to explore the meanings, understandings, and experiences of time at life’s most critical point, this book takes a thoughtful sociological approach to questions about how humans use and experience time in relation to when someone dies.

This book presents a sociological challenge to the long-held assumption that dying alone is a bad way to die and that for a death to be a good one the dying person should be accompanied. This assumption is represented in the deathbed scene, where the dying person is supported by religious or medical professionals, and accompanied by family and friends. This is a familiar scene to consumers of culture and is depicted in many texts including news media, fiction, television, drama and documentaries. The cultural script underpinning this assumption is examined, drawing on empirical data and published literature. Clarification is offered about what is meant when someone is said to die alone: are they alone at the precise moment of their death, or is it during the period before that? Questions are asked about whose interests are best served by the accompaniment of dying people, whether dying alone means dying lonely and whether, for some individuals, dying alone can be a choice and offer a good death? This book is suitable for scholars and students in the field of dying and death, as well as practitioners who work with dying people, some of whom may wish to be alone.

Did Hitler shoot himself in the Führerbunker or did he slip past the Soviets and escape to South America? Countless documentaries, newspaper articles and internet pages written by conspiracy theorists have led the ongoing debate surrounding Hitler's last days. Historians have not yet managed to make a serious response. Until now. This book is the first attempt by an academic to return to the evidence of Hitler's suicide in order to scrutinise the most recent arguments of conspiracy theorists using scientific methods. Through analysis of recently declassified MI5 files, previously unpublished sketches of Hitler's bunker, personal accounts of intelligence officers along with stories of shoot-outs, plunder and secret agents, this scrupulously researched book takes on the doubters to tell the full story of how Hitler died.

Narrative Fiction and Death: Dying Imagined offers a new perspective on the study of death in literature. It focuses on narrative fiction that conveys the experience of dying from the internal perspective of a dying protagonist. Writers from Victor Hugo in the early 1800s to Elif Shafak in the present day have imagined the unknowable final moments on the threshold to death. This literary study examines the wide range of narrative strategies used to evoke the transition from life to death, and to what effect, revealing not only each writer’s unique way of representing the dying experience; the comparative reading also finds common concerns in these texts and uncovers surprising parallels and unexplored intertextual relations between works across time and space that will interest comparatists as well as specialists in the literatures discussed. Students of individual texts examined here will benefit from detailed analyses of these works. The fictional evocation of dying addresses our basic human fears, offering catharsis, consolation, and a greater cognitive and emotional understanding of that unknowable experience. Presented in an engaging and highly readable manner, this study argues for literature’s potential to challenge our assumptions about the end of life and change our approach to dying, an aspect that will interest students and researchers of the health humanities, palliative caregivers, and all those interested in questions of the end of life.