Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and its Timings: When is Death?

by Shane McCorristine (editor)

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.   

Genres: History, Nonfiction

182 pages, Paperback

Published November 13, 2020

About the author

Dr Shane McCorristine is Reader in Cultural History at Newcastle University specialising in the history of crime, exploration, and the supernatural. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and his books include William Corder and the Red Barn Murder: Journeys of the Criminal Body (2014) and The Spectral Arctic: A History of Dreams and Ghosts in Polar Exploration (2018).