'A matter of individual opinion and feeling': the changing culture of mourning dress in the First World War

Mourning dress, the typically black costume worn to mark a bereavement was once a well-established part of funeral and mourning culture in Britain. The First World War is generally understood to have caused a major breakdown in mourning practices; the explanations offered for this breakdown include patriotism, practicality, concern for morale, and respect for the war dead. This paper will address the changes that took place within the culture of mourning dress between 1914 and 1918, while simultaneously considering how attitudes towards death and the rituals associated with bereavement were altered by the conflict. This will include an analysis of the developments in fashionable mourning dress during the war, assessing changes both in aesthetics and etiquette, in an attempt to determine the reasons for the breakdown. This paper will also discuss what comfort the ritual of mourning dress offered the war widow, and what constituted ‘war appropriate’ mourning in wartime

'R.I.P. man...u are missed and loved by many': entextualising moments of mourning on a Facebook Rest in Peace group site

Digital media offer new domains for people to articulate aspects of their everyday selves, as well as to share resources, views, attitudes, and emotions on an unprecedented scale (Barton and Lee 2013; Georgakopoulou 2006; Jones and Hafner 2012). The recent emergence of online environments as new sites for the temporal, spatial and social expansion of death and mourning (Brubaker and Hayes 2011; Brubaker, Hayes and Dourish 2013) has attracted scholarly interest in digital post-death rituals of mourning and memorialisation as an important social phenomenon (Walter et al. 2011; de Vries and Roberts 2004). While previous studies have been largely based on content analyses of individual MySpace logs and Facebook or discussion forum posts, the present study approaches digital memorial posts as entextualised moments of mourning shared with and for a networked audience (John 2013; Androutsopoulos 2014). The article analyses a corpus of Facebook memorial posts (N=525) as post sequences, wall events and texts, looking at how content on the site is produced, shared and discursively regimented. Based on the analysis, it is suggested that the intextualisation of moments of mourning on Facebook is participatory: it involves users’ selection of moments for public display relating to offline ceremonies of mourning, calendar-important dates or personal updates and contributing to the production of a textured wall in memory of the dead. The textuality of posts is found to rely on an ad hoc blending of formal genres of mourning and vernacular genres of writing dependent on (i) situational (date of posting activity, position in the post sequence) and (ii) extra-textual parameters (gender of poster, relationship with the deceased). The present socio-discursive investigation contributes to the growing, in-depth understanding of the texture and textuality of Web 2.0 mourning practices

Continuation of Mourning Dove Studies in Clark County, Arkansas, with Emphasis on Cyclical Behavioral Patterns

In conjunction with the U.S. Department of Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service, the Henderson State University Biology Department has continued a study of mourning doves in Clark County, Arkansas, with emphasis on cyclical behavioral patterns. Three hundred forty-three mourning doves were baited, trapped, and banded to obtain information concerning age, sex, populations, retraps, abnormalities, migrations, trap injuries, cyclical behavioral patterns, and other factors

Seeing the Sorrow Anew: Recapturing the Reality of Suffering Through Srebrenica

Those who know death know mourning. Those who know mourning know the meaning of empty spaces that we all wish had stayed filled. But do we, or even can we, as the few members of this society who habitually reflect upon the tragedies and triumphs of the past, fully understand the immensity of the suffering we dwell upon while wandering our battlefields? [excerpt

Towards a sociology of (public) mourning?

Within the last decade or so there has been a growing recognition among sociologists of the role played by emotions in various aspects of human behaviour (witness, for example, the range of articles appearing in Sociology alone, e.g. Jackson 1993; Craib 1995; Burkitt 1997, and the formation of a BSA study group devoted to the sociology of emotion). This burgeoning focus on emotions has challenged sociology to rethink its dominant conception of the human subject as governed by rational and conscious thought alone. In so doing it has raised a question mark both against the adequacy of the (theoretical) tools used for analysing emotions which have developed from these premises and the ability of sociology in general to provide answers to such questions

When Isaak Was Gone: An Auto-Ethnographic Meditation on Mourning a Toddler

Taking its starting point from the death and complicated mourning of the author’s own child, this article provides a meditation on the loss of a toddler. It was inspired by the lack of materials specific to the loss of a toddler, and on the complicated work of making meaning around the death of a child. The article is itself a work of mourning, drawing indirectly from theoretical work on trauma and mourning in order to begin to carve out a space for thinking about the specificities of the loss of a toddler. It asks questions about what it means to grieve for a child and what social and cultural demands serve to further complicate this process. As a meditation, it asks what helps and hinders the process of producing a narrative around the loss of a toddler as a means of consolation. It also suggests that the isolations of the work of mourning requires a narrative—a performative “telling”—to turn the thought that thought cannot tolerate, the death of a child, into something that may be communicated to both the self and others

Elegiac adaptations : resisting the closure of mourning in Elizabeth Robinson's Three Novels

textElizabeth Robinson's Three Novels (2011) is a lyric re-exploration of three Victorian novels: Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868) and The Woman in White (1859-60), and George Gissing's Eve's Ransom (1895). Robinson ostensibly wrote the poems as an elegy for her father; however, Three Novels also unearths elegiac aspects of its source novels that have been previously unexamined by critics. Each of the Victorian source novels narrates a movement from an initial loss toward an eventual resolution, mirroring the traditional structure of an elegy: mourning is ultimately completed by the acceptance of a compensatory substitute for the loss. While the poetry in Three Novels emphasizes the presence of elegy in its sources, the poems themselves fracture the practice of normative mourning by rewriting these novels in the style of Jahan Ramazani's melancholic "anti-elegy" which forecloses the possibility of loss resolution. Because the loss is not neatly resolved, it becomes an object of focus. Reading the anti-elegy manifest in Three Novels creates a space to mourn the losses incurred by each novel, thereby recuperating the overlooked figures of the female, the landscape, and the self that had been diminished by the narrative's drive to resolution.Englis

Figury samotnej żałoby

The intention of the author of this paper is to juxtapose the image ofmourning that accompanies the experience of death as represented in Blue, a film directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski, as a part of a The Three Colors Trilogy, and its personal linguistic expression in The Mourning Diary by Ronald Barthes. Both figures of mourning render to us an intimate world of mourning linked to a loss of somebody dear and express a peculiar state of exclusion as well as various yet real images of mourning “at work”. In both Blue and The Mourning Diary we are exposed to a different rhythm of lifeclosely linked to the melancholy of loss and a resultant vulnerability of the mourner towardsthe world