Severed

Severed
Author: Frances Larson
Publisher: Granta Books
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2014-11-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1847088015

Our history is littered with heads. Over the centuries, they have decorated our churches, festooned our city walls and filled our museums; they have been props for artists and specimens for laboratory scientists, trophies for soldiers and items of barter. Today, as videos of decapitations circulate online and cryonicists promise that our heads may one day live on without our bodies, the severed head is as contentious and compelling as ever. From shrunken heads to trophies of war; from memento mori to Damien Hirst's With Dead Head; from grave-robbing phrenologists to enterprising scientists, Larson explores the bizarre, often gruesome and confounding history of the severed head. Its story is our story.

The Severed Head

The Severed Head
Author: Julia Kristeva
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2012
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0231157207

Renowned philosopher and cultural theorist Kristeva (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection) offers an extended consideration of artistic figurations of the severed head, the organizing theme to an exhibition she coordinated at the Louvre in 1998. Though she follows a single historical trajectory, moving from Paleolithic skull cults to antique Greek sculpture to the Surrealist drawings, Kristeva eschews the disciplinary constraints of art history, instead employing psychoanalysis to explore the intertwined problems of representation and mortality posed by the severed head. For Kristeva, the capacity to figure the life of the mind first requires a confrontation with this horrific object that stands at the boundary between life and death, registering not only the loss of corporeal form but also subjective interiority. Though this book does not engage with recent images of decapitation, it is not without contemporary political-cultural import; for Kristeva, these cruel artistic figurations offer us the capacity to contemplate the sacred within a technology-driven contemporary visual culture. Verdict While a challenging text, this beautifully written and richly layered meditation on mortality and representation will undoubtedly appeal to those readers interested in semiotic and psychoanalytically informed readings of art.-Jonathan Patkowski, CUNY Graduate Ctr.(c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A Severed Head

A Severed Head
Author: Iris Murdoch
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 199
Release: 1976-11-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101495839

A novel about the frightfulness and ruthlessness of being in love, from the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea, The Sea Martin Lynch-Gibson believes he can possess both a beautiful wife and a delightful lover. But when his wife, Antonia, suddenly leaves him for her psychoanalyst, Martin is plunged into an intensive emotional reeducation. He attempts to behave beautifully and sensibly. Then he meets a woman whose demonic splendor at first repels him and later arouses a consuming and monstrous passion. As his Medusa informs him, “this is nothing to do with happiness.” A Severed Head was adapted for a successful stage production in 1963 and was later made into a film starring Claire Bloom, Lee Remick, Richard Attenborough, and Ian Holm.

The Beginning of Everything

The Beginning of Everything
Author: Robyn Schneider
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2013-08-27
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0062217151

Robyn Schneider's The Beginning of Everything is a witty and heart-wrenching teen novel that will appeal to fans of books by John Green and Ned Vizzini, novels such as The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and classics like The Great Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye. Varsity tennis captain Ezra Faulkner was supposed to be homecoming king, but that was before—before his girlfriend cheated on him, before a car accident shattered his leg, and before he fell in love with unpredictable new girl Cassidy Thorpe. As Kirkus said in a starred review, "Schneider takes familiar stereotypes and infuses them with plenty of depth. Here are teens who could easily trade barbs and double entendres with the characters that fill John Green's novels." Funny, smart, and including everything from flash mobs to blanket forts to a poodle who just might be the reincarnation of Jay Gatsby, The Beginning of Everything is a refreshing contemporary twist on the classic coming-of-age novel—a heart-wrenching story about how difficult it is to play the part that people expect, and how new beginnings can stem from abrupt and tragic endings.

Losing Our Heads

Losing Our Heads
Author: Regina Janes
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2005-08
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0814742696

What is the fascination that decollation holds for us, as individuals and as a culture? Why does the idea make us laugh and the act make us close our eyes? Losing Our Heads explores in both artistic and cultural contexts the role of the chopped-off head. It asks why the practice of decapitation was once so widespread, why it has diminished—but not, as scenes from contemporary Iraq show, completely disappeared—and why we find it so peculiarly repulsive that we use it as a principal marker to separate ourselves from a more “barbaric”or “primitive” past? Although the topic is grim, Regina Janes’s treatment and conclusions are neither grisly nor gruesome, but continuously instructive about the ironies of humanity’s cultural nature. Bringing to bear an array of evidence, the book argues that the human ability to create meaning from the body motivates the practice of decapitation, its diminution, the impossibility of its extirpation, and its continuing fascination. Ranging from antiquity to the late nineteenth-century passion for Salomé and John the Baptist, and from the enlightenment to postcolonial Africa’s challenge to the severed head as sign of barbarism, Losing Our Heads opens new areas of investigation, enabling readers to understand the shock of decapitation and to see the value in moving past shock to analysis. Written with penetrating wit and featuring striking illustrations, it is sure to captivate anyone interested in his or her head.

The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue

The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue
Author: Patricia Palmer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107041848

This book explores actual and literary depictions of beheadings in sixteenth-century Ireland and addresses how violence is transcribed into art.

Undreamed Shores

Undreamed Shores
Author: Frances Larson
Publisher: Granta Books
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2021-03-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1783783338

In the first decades of the 20th century, five women - Katherine Routledge, Maria Czaplicka, Winifred Blackman, Beatrice Blackwood and Barbara Freire-Marreco - arrived at Oxford to take the newly created Masters in Anthropology. Though their circumstances differed radically, all were intent on visiting and studying remote communities a world away from their own. Through their work, they resisted the prejudices of the male establishment, proving that women could be explorers and scientists, too. In the wastes of Siberia; in the villages and pueblos of the Nile and New Mexico; on Easter Island; and in the uncharted interior of New Guinea, they found new freedoms - yet when they returned to England, loss, madness and self-doubt awaited them. Frances Larson's masterful group biography is a revelatory portrait of five hidden heroines of British scholarship.

Severance

Severance
Author: Robert Olen Butler
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2006-08-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780811856140

Pulitzer-winning Butler presents 62 stories, each exactly 240 words long, capturing the flow of thoughts and feelings that go through a person's mind after their head has been severed. The characters are both real and imagined, including Medusa and Anne Boleyn.

Rest in Pieces

Rest in Pieces
Author: Bess Lovejoy
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2013-03-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1451655010

A “marvelously macabre” (Kirkus Reviews) history of the bizarre afterlives of corpses of the celebrated and notorious dead. For some of the most influential figures in history, death marked the start of a new adventure. The famous deceased have been stolen, burned, sold, pickled, frozen, stuffed, impersonated, and even filed away in a lawyer’s office. Their fingers, teeth, toes, arms, legs, skulls, hearts, lungs, and nether regions have embarked on voyages that crisscross the globe and stretch the imagination. Counterfeiters tried to steal Lincoln’s corpse. Einstein’s brain went on a cross-country road trip. And after Lord Horatio Nelson perished at Trafalgar, his sailors submerged him in brandy—which they drank. From Alexander the Great to Elvis Presley, and from Beethoven to Dorothy Parker, Rest in Pieces connects the lives of the famous dead to the hilarious and horrifying adventures of their corpses, and traces the evolution of cultural attitudes toward death.

Heads Will Roll

Heads Will Roll
Author: Larissa Tracy
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2012-01-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004211551

Capitalizing upon the enduring fascination with decapitation in European culture, this collection examines--through a variety of critical lenses--the recurring "roles/rolls" of severed human heads in the medieval and early modern imagination.