Exploring grief : towards a sociology of sorrow / edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Anders Petersen.

Introduction: towards a sociology of grief: historical, cultural and social explorations of grief as an emotion / Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Anders Petersen -- Grief in modern history: an ongoing evolution / Peter N. Stearns -- Diversity in human grieving: historical and cross-cultural perspectives / Paul C. Rosenblatt -- The impact of the two World Wars on cultures of grieving: grief in England, 1914-1980 / Patricia Jalland -- Magical thinking: experiences of grief and mourning in George Saunders' Lincoln in the bardo and Jesmyn Ward's Sing, unburied, sing / Kjersti Bale and Hilde Bondevik -- A story of loss: self-narration of grief and public feeling rules / Nina R. Jakoby and Fiona A. Anderau -- Writing grief: the fraught work of mourning in fiction / Christian Riegel -- The denial of grief: reflections from a decade of anthropological research on parental bereavement and child death / Mary Ellen Macdonald -- Public mourning: displays of grief and grievance / Jack Santino -- Grief in human and companion-animal loss, bonding and dividual pet-personhood / Douglas J. Davies -- The medicalisation of grief / Allan V. Horwitz -- Suffocated grief, resilience and survival among African-American families / Tashel C. Bordere -- Grief in an individualised society: a critical corrective to the advancement of diagnostic culture / Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Anders Petersen.

"As modern society's routine sequestration of death and grief is increasingly replaced by late-modern society's growing concern with existential issues and emotionality, this book explores grief as a social emotion, bringing together contributions from scholars across the social sciences and humanities to examine its social and cultural aspects. Thematically organised in order to consider the historical changes in our understanding of grief, literary treatments of grief, contemporary forms of grief and grief as a perspective from which to engage in critique of society, it provides insights into the sociality of grief and will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory and cultural studies with interests in the emotions and social pathologies"--