ABSTRACT

As modern society’s routine sequestration of death and grief is increasingly replaced by late-modern society’s growing concern with existential issues and emotionality, this book explores grief as a social emotion, bringing together contributions from scholars across the social sciences and humanities to examine its social and cultural aspects. Thematically organised in order to consider the historical changes in our understanding of grief, literary treatments of grief, contemporary forms of grief and grief as a perspective from which to engage in critique of society, it provides insights into the sociality of grief and will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory and cultural studies with interests in the emotions and social pathologies.

chapter |18 pages

Introduction

Towards a sociology of grief – historical, cultural and social explorations of grief as an emotion

part I|48 pages

Grief and history

chapter 1|16 pages

Grief in modern history

An ongoing evolution

chapter 2|15 pages

Diversity in human grieving

Historical and cross-cultural perspectives

chapter 3|15 pages

The impact of the two world wars on cultures of grieving

Grief in England, 1914–1980

part II|55 pages

Grief and literature

chapter 4|15 pages

Magical thinking

Experiences of grief and mourning in George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

chapter 5|20 pages

A story of loss

Self-narration of grief and public feeling rules

chapter 6|18 pages

Writing grief

The fraught work of mourning in fiction

part III|46 pages

Forms of grief

chapter 7|15 pages

The denial of grief

Reflections from a decade of anthropological research on parental bereavement and child death

chapter 8|13 pages

Public mourning

Displays of grief and grievance

part IV|56 pages

Grief and social critique

chapter 10|17 pages

The medicalization of grief

chapter 12|20 pages

Grief in an individualized society

A critical corrective to the advancement of diagnostic culture