Over Her Dead Body: Femininity, Death and the Aesthetic

The conjuction of death, art, and femininity is a rich and unexplored stratum of Western culture. Why do dead women fascinate even as they repel? Why is the death of a beautiful woman figure so centrallly located in art and literature? And what does this tell us about the role of women in contemprary Westen society? In Over Her Dead Body, Elisabeth Bronfen attempts to remap the history of Western thought about women's bodies. material from a common repertoire of cultural images, can be read as symptoms of our culture.