Chiefly a collection of essays originally presented at a colloquium held Nov. 1988 at the Harvard Center for Literary and Cultural Studies.
Contents:
Touching death / Ernst van Alphen -- A valediction forbidding mourning : death and the narratee in Brontèˆ's Villette / Garrett Stewart -- Lacan, the death drive, and the dream of the burning child / Ellie Ragland Sullivan -- Risky resemblances : on repetition, mourning, and representation / Elisabeth Bronfen -- Painting the dead : portraiture and necrophilia in Victorian art and poetry / Carol Christ -- Romanticism and the ghost of prostitution : Freud, Maria, and "Alice Fell" / Sarah Webster Goodwin -- Writing as voodoo : sorcery, hysteria, and art / Regina Barreca -- Women in the forbidden zone : war, women, and death / Margaret R. Higonnet -- Euripides' Alcestis : how to die a normal death in Greek tragedy / Charles Segal -- Beheadings / Regina Janes -- "Who kills whores?" "I do," says Jack : race and gender in Victorian London / Sander L. Gilman -- Representing Sati : continuities and discontinuities / Rajeswari Sunder Rajan -- Afterword : Walter Benjamin and the crisis of representation : multiplicity, meaning, and athematic death / Ronald Schleifer
