Images of the Corpse

This compelling book brings together physicians, artists, and scholars of film, literature, philosophy, art, and politics to discuss the representation of the corpse in Western culture. Spanning a timeline from the Renaissance to the present, these essays introduce readers to a modern autopsy, a public execution and dissection in seventeenth-century England, the genre of postmortem photography, the corpse as artist's model, images of dead women in such popular films as Copycat and The Silence of the Lambs, and post-mortem scenes in the works of Flaubert, Balzac, Andres Serrano, and others.