Graveyards: A History of Living with the Dead

An arresting and poignant cultural history of graveyards, from early burial sites to now.

Why, how and where do we inter our dead? How do we set out to remember them? The Pyramids of Giza, the catacombs and columbaria of Rome and the cenotaphs erected to the world’s war dead are but some of the answers. In inimitable style, Roger Luckhurst probes the often moving, sometimes contested ways in which people throughout history have responded to the ‘problem’ of laying the dead to rest.

Blending history, art, literature and popular culture, Graveyards explores the various different aspects of the treatment of the dead. Chapters range from early burials and the emergence of necropolises and catacombs, to grave-robbing, garden cemeteries and the perilous overcrowding of the urban dead, to monuments for deceased heroes and rulers and the development of modern memorial culture. The products of our persistent fascination with graveyards are everywhere in literature, art, film and television, and Luckhurst engages these cultural afterlives alongside grave sites’ particular social and historical contexts.

Illustrations throughout offer insights into the rich and unusual visual culture of the grave: helpful guides and provisions for the afterlife, tender dedications, gravestones and effigies sit with memento mori paintings, artistic visions of the underworld and stills from classic horror. Beautifully designed and carefully researched, this book takes a lyrical, unexpected look at graveyards as both site and symbol.

About the Author

Roger Luckhurst is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London and has written for the Financial Times, Guardian and London Review of Books, as well as being a regular contributor for the BBC. His books include Gothic: An Illustrated History (T&H, 2021), Zombies: A Cultural History (2015) and editions of novels by Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson and H. P. Lovecraft.