Symbolic loss : the ambiguity of mourning and memory at century's end / edited by Peter Homans.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and the puzzle of inherited mourning -- Live burial and its discontents : mourning becomes melancholia in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents -- "My Lord, what a morning" : the "Sorrow songs" in Harlem Renaissance thought -- Window or mirror : the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the ambiguity of remembrance -- Against redemption : the arts of countermemory in Germany today -- Of death and destiny : the Ariès-Vovelle debate about the history of mourning -- Mourning, mass death, and the gray zone : the ethnic Germans of Eastern Europe and the Second World War -- The most intimate of creations : symptoms as memorials to one's lonely suffering -- Stalin's double death : memory and mourning among French Communist Party activists -- Loss and mourning in the life and thought of Max Weber : toward a theory of symbolic loss.