Over Her Dead Body

Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich

• Part 1 Death - the epitome of tropes: preparation for an autopsy; the lady vanishes; violence of representation - representation of violence. Part 2 From animate body to inanimate text: the "most" poetic topic; deathbed scenes; bodies on display; the lady is a portrait; noli me videre; case study - wife to Mr Rossetti - Elizabeth Siddall (1829-1862). Part 3 Strategies of translation, mitigation and exchange: sacrificing extremity; femininity - missing in action; close encounters of a fatal kind. Part 4 Stabilizing the ambivalence of repetition: the speculated woman; rigour has set in - the wasted bride; necromancy, or closing the crack in the gravestone; risk resemblances; spectral stories; the dead beloved as muse; case study - Henry's sister - Alice James (1848-1892). Part 5 Conclusion - aporias of resistance: from muse to creatrix - Snow White unbound.

Aside from the originality - or fearful finality - of its arguments, the book will be invaluable as an introduction to the use of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of cultural texts' - New Statesman & Society'Death faces a similar taboo in our century to the one that sex suffered in the last...Bronfen addresses an important silence in contemporary culture.' - The TImes