Macabre

About: Macabre is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 367 publications have been published within this topic receiving 2813 citations.

What’s so ‘Dark’ about ‘Dark Tourism’?: Death, Tours, and Performance:

Abstract: Tourist studies scholars have sought to differentiate tours of the picturesque, the romantic, and the sublime from those of the disgusting, the abject, and the macabre. The assumption is that touri...

Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700

Abstract: Looking back at images of violence in the popular culture of early modern England, we find that the specter of the murderer loomed most vividly not in the stranger, but in the familiar; and not in the master, husband, or father, but in the servant, wife, or mother. A gripping exploration of seventeenth-century accounts of domestic murder in fact and fiction, this book is the first to ask why.Frances E. Dolan examines stories ranging from the profoundly disturbing to the comically macabre: of husband murder, wife murder, infanticide, and witchcraft. She surveys trial transcripts, confessions, and scaffold speeches, as well as pamphlets, ballads, popular plays based on notorious crimes, and such well-known works as The Tempest, Othello, Macbeth, and The Winter's Tale. Citing contemporary analogies between the politics of household and commonwealth, she shows how both legal and literary narratives attempt to restore the order threatened by insubordinate dependents.

Shelley the Pursuit

Abstract: A fantastic reissue of Richard Holmes' epic biography of this most enigmatic and intriguing of the Romantic poets. This is simply one of the greatest biographical achievements of recent years. Shelley, the most neglected of all the great Romantic poets, was born in Sussex in 1792 and died in Tuscany in 1822, a brief life packed with love affairs, alarums and excursions. Holmes's book offers a serious and critical reappraisal of Shelley as a man and a writer; all his prose and poetry is carefully re-examined, his sense of spiritual and geographical isolation brilliantly described and a detailed portrait of his macabre imaginative life slowly assembled. Shelley's intense friendships with some of the most remarkable figures of his age fill Holmes's pages with a vivid parorama of revolutionary idealism and recklessness. To this is added the private story of Shelley's tortuous romantic liaisons, complications which affected both the peculiar tenor of his daily life and the remotest conceptions of his poetry. This is a stunning, entrancing biography of a fascinating subject, and a timely reissue of an absolutely seminal work.

The complete tales and poems of Edgar Allan Poe.

Abstract: Macabre parties in isolated castles ...Gruesome bestial murders ...Talking ravens, hellish black pits, innocents buried alive ...Prepare to be chilled and enthralled by the haunting genius of the acknowledged master of gothic horror and suspense, Edgar Allan Poe. The stories and poems in this complete anthology probe to the depths of the human psyche and include the infamous - and arguably the first ever - detective story "Murders in the Rue Morgue"; the disturbing classic, "The Fall of the House of Usher" and the horrifyingly claustrophobic, "The Pit and the Pendulum". The perfect bedtime read - for the daring and the brave.

Dark tourism and the cadaveric carnival: mediating life and death narratives at Gunther von Hagens' Body Worlds

Abstract: Death is universal, yet dying is not. Consequently, within contemporary secularised society, the process of dying has largely been relocated from the familiar environs of the family and community to a back region of medical and death industry professionals. It is argued that this institutional sequestration of death has made modern dying ‘bad’ against a romantic portrayal of a death with dignity, or a ‘good’ death. Moreover, the structural analysis of death reveals issues of ontological security and mortality meaning for the Self. This paper, therefore, adds to that analysis, and specifically examines the construction of mortality meaning within the context of dark tourism – that is, the act of travel to sites of death, disaster or the seemingly macabre. Particularly, the research interrogates the Body Worlds exhibition – a touring attraction of real human corpses – as a reflective space to mediate mortality. In doing so, this paper concludes that dark tourism is a new mediating institution that allows th...