C. Todd White
Death, Desire and Loss In Western Culture is a testament to our ubiquitous preoccupation with the tangled web of death and desire. In this work, cultural critic Jonathan Dollimore takes on a subject of vast significance and connects us to our lives, our deaths, and our desires. Demonstrating a remarkable ability to explain complex ideas with eloquence and grace, he tells a story about the making and undoing of the modern individual.
Modern fears have long made death unthinkable, unspeakable. Dollimore's book now lets distant voices once again utter their dialogues of death. Without anachronism, Dollimore discloses the anxieties of the present in writings of the past.
The union of thanatos and eros is a central topos in Western literature. Drawing upon this compelling theme as the scaffolding upon which to construct nothing less than a history of Western culture, this book extends study from the Greeks and Hebrew Bible to our society's most urgent confrontation with AIDS. Death, Desire and Loss is an original and provocative meditation on the history of Western thought and on one of its most sublime themes.
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