The Unknown Country: Death in Australia, Britain and the USA [Hardcover]

In a strategy deliberately counter to many earlier texts which focus on social aspects of death and dying this book will not examine death through the social prism of US or British culture alone. Drawing only on material from a single society gives readers the misleading impression of a universal experience. As a text in the sociology of death and dying this volume examines culture-specific images and experiences of death in three major western societies - Australia, Britain and the USA.Preface - Notes on Contributors - Death in the Country of Matilda; A.Kellehear & I.Anderson - Secular, Savage and Solitary: Death in Australian Painting; L.Fitzpatrick - Good Girls Die, Bad Girls Don't: The Uses of the Dying Virgin in Nineteenth-Century Australian Fiction; S.K.Martin - Prayers to Broken Stones: War and Death in Australia; P.D'Alton - The Legacy of Suicide: The Impact of Suicide on Families; M.Fraser - Death and The Great Australian Disaster; B.Raphael - Is there a British Way of Death?; G.Howarth - Women, Death and In-Memoriam Notices in a Local British Newspaper; S.Adams - The Social Construction of Funerals in Britain; B.Smale - Emotional Reserve and the British Way of Grief; T.Walter - Why was England the First Country to Popularise Cremation?; P.C.Jupp - The Public Construction of AIDS Deaths in the United Kingdom; N.Small - The American Ways of Death; M.R.Leming & G.E.Dickinson - You Never Have to Die! On Mormons, NDEs, Cryonics and the American Immortalist Ethos; M.Kearl - Death, Dying and Bioethics: Current Issues in the USA; R.Bendiksen - Managing the Spectre of Death: The War against Drug Use and AIDS in America; J.A.Levy & D.J.Amick - Grief and Loss of Self; K.Charmaz - Diversity in Universality: Dying, Death and Grief; D.P.Irish - IndexKATHY CHARMAZ is Professor and Chair and Faculty Writing Coordinator in the Sociology Department at Sonoma State University, USA. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of California, San FranciscolS6