![]() | Losing Our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture 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? Janes Regina : Regina Janes is professor of English at Skidmore College. She is the author of Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Revolutions in Wonderland and One Hundred Years of Solitude: Modes of Reading . |
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