Losing Our Heads : Beheadings in Literature and Culture

Why are beheadings so captivating in society and literature? Losing Our Heads: Beheadings In Literature And Culture tackles a gruesome topic, providing a healthy dose of anthropological, medical, social and literary insight to accounts of beheadings from antiquity to modern times.- Bookwatch View the Table of Contents. Read the Prologue. To read Losing Our Heads is to experience that same frisson Regina Janes ascribes to the guillotine-a powerful and seductive and (excuse me) heady combination of gossip and scholarship. -Kathryn Davis, author of Versailles What is the fascination that decollation holds for us, as individuals and as a culture? Why does the idea make us laugh and the act make us close our eyes? Losing Our Heads explores in both artistic and cultural contexts the role of the chopped-off head. It asks why the practice of decapitation was once so widespread, why it has diminished-but not, as scenes from contemporary Iraq show, completely disappeared-and why we find it so peculiarly repulsive that we use it as a principal marker to separate ourselves from a more obarbarico or oprimitiveo past? Although the topic is grim, Regina Janes?s treatment and conclusions are neither grisly nor gruesome, but continuously instructive about the ironies of humanity?s cultural nature. Bringing to bear an array of evidence, the book argues that the human ability to create meaning from the body motivates the practice of decapitation, its diminution, the impossibility of its extirpation, and its continuing fascination. Ranging from antiquity to the late nineteenth-century passion for Salom? and John the Baptist, and from the enlightenment to postcolonial Africa?s challenge to the severed head as sign of barbarism, Losing Our Heads opens new areas of investigation, enabling readers to understand the shock of decapitation and to see the value in moving past shock to analysis. Written with penetrating wit and featuring striking illustrations, it is sure to captivate anyone interested in his or her head.

Regina Janes is Professor of English at Skidmore College