Description:
When Evelyn Waugh wrote The Loved One (1948) as a satire of the elaborate preparations and memorialization of the dead taking place in his time, he had no way of knowing how extraordinarily creative and technical human funerary practices would become. Jacqueline S. Thursby explores how modern American funerals and their accompanying rituals seem meant to benefit the living rather than the dead. Funeral Festivals in America suggests that there is an irony in the festivities surrounding death and that the American response to death often develops into an event celebrating the ties between family members and friends. Thursby cites rituals for loved ones separated at the time of death, the frivolities surrounding death, funeral foods and feasts, post-funeral rites and ongoing commemorations, and many other facets of the American way of dealing with death.
Brief description: Jacqueline S. Thursby is an associate professor in the English department at Brigham Young University.
Review Quotes:
A fascinating study of American resilience and community spirit at times of bereavement. Jacqueline Thursby reveals with wit and sensitivity how American funerals have become celebrations of life, instead of lamentations of death, at which loved ones mend torn relations through sumptuous banquets, heart-warming memories, and gregarious laughter. She demonstrates with exquisite detail how the restoration of communal ties among the bereaved stands central in contemporary American mortuary rituals, irrespective of their cultural, ethnic, and religious differences."
--Antonius C.G.M. Robben, editor of Death, Mourning, and Burial: A Cross-Cultural