The Unknown Country: Death in Australia, Britain and the USA

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

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2. Death in the Country of Matilda

   • Allan Kellehear, Ian Anderson

   Pages 1-14

3. Secular, Savage and Solitary: Death in Australian Painting

   • Lesley Fitzpatrick

   Pages 15-30

4. Good Girls Die, Bad Girls Don’t: the Uses of the Dying Virgin in Nineteenth-century Australian Fiction

   • Susan K. Martin

   Pages 31-44

5. Prayers to Broken Stones: War and Death in Australia

   • Phillip D’Alton

   Pages 45-57

6. The Legacy of Suicide: the Impact of Suicide on Families

   • Mary Fraser

   Pages 58-71

7. Death and the Great Australian Disaster

   • Beverley Raphael

   Pages 72-83

8. Is There a British Way of Death?

   • Glennys Howarth

   Pages 84-97

9. Women, Death and In Memoriam Notices in a Local British Newspaper

   • Sheila Adams

   Pages 98-112

10. The Social Construction of Funerals in Britain

    • Bernard Smale

    Pages 113-126

11. Emotional Reserve and the English Way of Grief

    • Tony Walter

    Pages 127-140

12. Why was England the First Country to Popularize Cremation?

    • Peter C. Jupp

    Pages 141-154

13. The Public Construction of AIDS Deaths in the United Kingdom

    • Neil Small

    Pages 155-168

14. The American Ways of Death

    • Michael R. Leming, George E. Dickinson

    Pages 169-183

15. You Never Have to Die! On Mormons NDEs, Cryonics, and the American Immortalist Ethos

    • Michael Kearl

    Pages 184-197

16. Death, Dying and Bioethics: Current Issues in the USA

    • Robert Bendiksen

    Pages 198-212

17. Managing the Spectre of Death: the War against Drug Use and AIDS in America

    • Judith A. Levy, Daniel J. Amick

    Pages 213-228

18. Grief and Loss of Self

    • Kathy Charmaz

    Pages 229-241

19. Diversity in Universality: Dying, Death and Grief

    • Donald P. Irish

    Pages 242-256

20. Back Matter

    Pages 257-268

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In a strategy deliberately counter to many earlier texts which focus on social aspects of death and dying this book will not examine death through the social prism of US or British culture alone. Drawing only on material from a single society gives readers the misleading impression of a universal experience. As a text in the sociology of death and dying this volume examines culture-specific images and experiences of death in three major western societies - Australia, Britain and the USA.

• AIDS
• bioethics
• culture
• emotion
• Familie
• society
• sociology
• USA

• Sonoma State University, USA

  Kathy Charmaz

• University of Sussex, England

  Glennys Howarth

• La Trobe University, Australia

  Allan Kellehear

KATHY CHARMAZ is Professor and Chair and Faculty Writing Coordinator in the Sociology Department at Sonoma State University, USA. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of California, San Francisco, in 1973 and joined the faculty at Sonoma State University at that time. She is Vice-President elect of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. Professor Charmaz is the author of The Social Reality of Death and Good Days, Bad Days: the Self in Chronic Illness and Time. Good Days, Bad Days was awarded the 1992 Distinguished Scholarship Award by the Pacific Sociological Association and the 1992 Charles Horton Cooley Award of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction.

GLENNYS HOWARTH is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Sussex. She was formerly T. H. Marshall Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics, and is the author of Last Rites and editor (with Peter Jupp) of Contemporary Issues in the Sociology of Death, Dying and Disposal and The Changing Face of Death. Dr Howarth is also founding editor (with Peter Jupp) of the journal Mortality, the first major international journal of death, dying and bereavement outside the Uniter States.

ALLAN KELLEHAR is Professor and Head of Research Development at Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre, a non-government research and clinical services organisation affiliated with the University of Melbourne. Previously he was Senior Lecturer in Sociology at La Trobe University and Lecturer and Lecturer in Sociology at Deakin University in Australia. He is the author of Dying of Cancer: the Final Year of Life, The Unobtrusive Researcher: a Guide to Methods and Experiences Near Death: Beyond Medicine and Religion. He is also co-editor (with Derek Colquhoun) of the two volume Health Research in Practice.

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