 | Death in Contemporary Popular Culture Subjects: Behavioral Sciences; Humanities; Social Sciences; Cultural Studies; Media & Film Studies; Sociology & Social Policy; Mental Health; Death Studies; Sociology of Culture; Medical Sociology; With intense and violent portrayals of death becoming ever more common on television and in cinema and the growth of death-centric movies, series, texts, songs, and video clips attracting a wide and enthusiastic global reception, we might well ask whether death has ceased to be a taboo. What makes thanatic themes so desirable in popular culture? Do representations of the macabre and gore perpetuate or sublimate violent desires? Has contemporary popular culture removed our unease with death? Can social media help us cope with our mortality, or can music and art present death as an aesthetic phenomenon? This volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the discussion of the social, cultural, aesthetic, and theoretical aspects of the ways in which popular culture understands, represents, and manages death, bringing together contributions from around the world focused on television, cinema, popular literature, social media and the internet, art, music, and advertising. Adriana Teodorescu is Associate Lecturer in the Faculty of Sociology at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. She is the editor of Death within the Text: Social, Philosophical and Aesthetic Approaches to Literature, Death Representations in Literature. Forms and Theories and co-editor of Dying and Death in 18th-21st Century Europe and Dying and Death in 18th-21st Century Europe: Volume 2 . Michael Hviid Jacobsen is Professor of Sociology at Aalborg University, Denmark. He is the editor of The Poetics of Crime and Postmortal Society and co-editor of The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman , Encountering the Everyday , The Transformation of Modernity , Utopia: Social Theory and the Future , Liquid Criminology , Emotions and Crime: Towards a Criminology of the Emotions , Exploring Grief: Towards a Sociology of Sorrow , and Imaginative Methodologies: The Poetic Imagination in the Social Sciences .
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