Losing Our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture. By Regina Janes. New York: New York University Press, 2005, xv + 254pp
, If you can keep your head when all about you, Are losing theirs and blaming it on you …, … You’ll be a man, my son. Rudyard Kipling's poem ‘If’, recently voted the most popular poem in a British poll on poetry, states a rather obvious truth. Without our heads we are nothing, neither man, nor...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Review |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press
2006
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| In: |
Literature and theology
Year: 2006, Volume: 20, Issue: 3, Pages: 331-332 |
| Further subjects: | B
Book review
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | , If you can keep your head when all about you, Are losing theirs and blaming it on you …, … You’ll be a man, my son. Rudyard Kipling's poem ‘If’, recently voted the most popular poem in a British poll on poetry, states a rather obvious truth. Without our heads we are nothing, neither man, nor indeed, woman. The earliest vertebrates apparently did not have bony vertebrae—they were just heads, brains covered with external bone. The rest of the body came later. In Regina Janes’ fascinating, if rather chaotic, book, we are introduced to the grisly world of decapitation, a sort of history of the human head as body part, but much more significantly as enduring metaphor and metonymy. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4623 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Literature and theology
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/litthe/frl033 |