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I. The ancient world -- II. Mutability, melancholy and quest : the Renaissance -- III. Social death -- IV. Modernity and philosophy : the authenticity of nothingness -- V. The desire not to be : late metaphysics and psychoanalysis -- VI. Renouncing death -- VII. The aesthetics of energy -- VIII. Death and the homoerotic.

Examining a spectrum of post-mortem images, this volume considers what death photography communicates about attitudes related to dying, mourning and the afterlife. Focusing on American examples, topics are discussed alongside contemporary representations of death, as seen in celebrity death images and forensic photography.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- List of Contributors -- Acknowledgments -- Connecting Women and Death: An Introduction -- PART I: MOURNING PRACTICES -- 1 Widows and Courtesans, "Pizzocchere" and Nuns: Women in Mourning in the Venetian Republic, 1400-1800 -- 2 Fashioning Death/Gendering Sentiment: Mourning Jewelry in Britain in the Eighteenth Century -- The Changing Practices of Mourning -- From Memento Mori to Memento Moveri -- The Female Mourner: The Gendering of Mourning and the Sentimental Body -- 3 Emotions and Rituals: Responses to Death among the Nobility in Modern France -- 4 Stitching (in) Death: Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century American and English Mourning Samplers -- Death and Postmortem Practices -- Plain-Stitch Mourning Samplers -- Fancywork Mourning Samplers -- Conclusion -- 5 "The Thing They Knew": Social Exclusion at Southern Wakes in Eudora Welty's "The Wanderers" and The Optimist's Daughter -- 6 "Confessional" Poetry and the Material Culture of Death -- Everyday Objects and Women's Grief -- Male "Confessional" Poets and Memorial -- The Body as Object -- The Poem as Object -- PART II: MEMORIALIZING -- 7 Columbia Mourns: The Distaff Side of Washington's Long Farewell -- Symbols of Birth and Death Chambers in Transition -- Feminine Symbols Exchanged During Mourning -- Women Segregated in Mourning Washington -- First Ladies Respond to the Civic Reinvention of George Washington -- A Feminine Consciousness of Inheritance -- 8 More than "A Heap of Dust": The Material Memorialization of Three Nineteenth-Century Women's Graves -- The Cemetery as Heterotopia -- Hannah Adams -- Louisa Wells -- Ona Judge Staines -- Implications of Cemeteries as Space/Place -- 9 Domesticating Death in the Sentimental Republic: Commemoration and Mourning in U.S. Civil War Nurses' Memoirs

In 2010, I published a book, Bettymania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture. In this article, I want to revisit the topic, not because Bettymania matches our present reality but, rather, to measure our present paradigm against its originator. Whatever new era we now occupy, it can no longer be accurately dubbed "celebrity-driven." Given that our airwaves are saturated with reality TV and YouTube navel gazing, that Facebook has now turned everyone into an expert on personal branding and self-promotion, and that, in America, we have a celebrity as our commander-in-chief, this argument may strike many as wrongheaded; but, to a large extent, what we meant by celebrity culture and the rules that we affixed to it, no longer apply. A study of Bettymania may well offer us some understanding of celebrity culture, but the inception of that culture now seems trivial compared to its date of expiration, which, I argue, occurred the moment Donald Trump was elected President of the United States.