Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture / Edition 1

by Jonathan Dollimore

Overview

Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture is a rich testament to our ubiquitous preoccupation with the tangled web of death and desire. In these pages we find nuanced analysis that blends Plato with Shelley, Hölderlin with Foucault. Dollimore, a gifted thinker, is not content to summarize these texts from afar; instead, he weaves a thread through each to tell the magnificent story of the making of the modern individual.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415937726
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	08/08/2001
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jonathan Dollimore is Professor in the School of English and American Studies at the University of Sussex. He is author of the critically acclaimed Sexual Dissidence.

Table of Contents

Introduction. I Ancient World. II Mutability, Melancholy and Quest: The Renaissance. III Social Death. IV Modernity and Philosophy: The Authenticity of Nothingness. V The Desire Not To Be: Late Metaphysics and Psychoanalysis. VI Renouncing Death. VII The Aesthetics of Energy. VIII Death and The Homoerotic. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

What People are Saying About This

Roy Porter

Probing and perceptive, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture is truly a tour de force.

Marjorie Garber

"Another briliant accomplishment from one of Britain's foremost theorists of literature and sexuality."

Henry Louis Gates

"Death, Dessire and Loss is an original and provocative meditation on the history of Westrn thought, and on one of the most sublime themes."

Editorial Reviews

This is a work of breath-taking scope and reach. ...impressive command of sources and penetrating vision....

Theological Studies

...an impressively versatile survey... Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture is a boldly transhistorical book from one who would lay claim to the title of cultural materialist.

London Review of Books

In his prodigiously intelligent, deeply challenging and ultimately rewarding book, Dollimore (Sexual Dissidence) argues that the death/desire dynamic, while banefully associated in recent times with AIDS, is not a new or alternate phenomenon but was crucial in the formation of Western culture. In chapter after chapter, inspired, finely honed analysis of canonical works of philosophy, fiction, drama and more shows how early civilization's ambiguous ideas about death repeat themselves and shape gender and identity. In the Renaissance, for example, death was fused with desire via the concept of mutability and its inherent paradox. To put it simply, if man loves most what is fleeting (especially beauty, which will eventually fade), then will his desire always be unfulfilled. Similarly, Socrates, accused of corrupting the youth of Athens, willingly takes the poison that kills him and his cravings while "the sun is still on the mountains," putting a strange twist to Seneca's carpe diem. Since Dollimore's analysis is structured by intellectual trends rather than by era, there is a dizzying effecthere, and one begins to wonder what kind of "non-specialist" reader the author has in mind, particularly given the density of many of the thinkers he takes on. Yet his hopeful conclusion works toward a way out of the death/desire rubric with convincing passion. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"Prodigiously intelligent, deeply challenging and ultimately rewarding..." — Publishers Weekly
"This is a work of breath-taking scope and reach. ...impressive command of sources and penetrating vision..." — Theological Studies
"...this immensely wide-ranging account repays careful study." — Library Journal
"...an impressively versatile survey... Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture is a boldly transhistorical book from one who would lay claim to the title of cultural materialist." — London Review of Books
"In [Dollimore's] engaging study of death and its corresponding link to desire. . . . he offers a substantial contribution to Western intellectual history. . . . Dollimore presents a marvelous, enrapturing, and accessible work for both the scholar and the armchair philosopher." — Booklist, starred review
"This will be an important book for all those engaged in cultural criticism. Highly recommended for upper-division undergraduates through faculty, and for general readers." — Choice
"The union of thanatos and eros is a central topos of Western literature. Jonathan Dollimore has drawn upon this compelling theme as the scaffolding upon which to construct nothing less than a history of Western culture, from the Greeks and the Hebrew Bible, to our society's most urgent confrontation with AIDS. Monumental in conception and magisterial in execution, Death, Desire and Loss is an original and provocative meditation on the history of Western thought, and on one of the most sublime themes." — Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
"Another brilliant accomplishment from one of Britain's foremost theorists of literature and sexuality. This is a superb reading of philosophies of death and structures of desire, classical, early modern and postmodern. An important and compelling book that speaks to key issues of our time." — Marjorie Garber
"Probing and perceptive, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture is truly a tour de force." — Roy Porter
"[Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture] throws fascinating light on the way we have been living and loving and dying for the last two and a half millennia."
"Dollimore's reach is vast.." — Richard McCoy, Winter 2000

From the Publisher