ABSTRACT
Thanatopsis in history The novelty of De Quincey's arguments will be considered later but we will start by recognising what they owed to the past. The essay can be seen as a contribution to a longstanding cultural tradition which exists in all societies and which had been particularly foregrounded in Christian culture within Western Europe. It is a discursive field known as Thanatopsis. The dictionary (OED) definition of this is 'contemplation of death*. In this paper it will be interpreted more broadly to mean, not just the contemplation of death, but the stimuli by which such contemplations are generated and the forms of contemplative response such stimuli tend to produce. Thanatopsis, in these terms, includes all the signifying forms of representation, symbolisation and material evidence by which ideas of death are communicated to an individual in time and space within a given society. These thanatoptic signifiers tend to produce meanings which comprise: ideas on death in general; conceptions of an individual's own death; and notions of the deaths of others, both close and distant in time and space.
