Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic

Elisabeth Bronfen, (1992) Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN:0-7190-3827-8.

Written as a critical analysis of the subject of the death of a beautiful woman in western art and literature, Bronfen has examined how an apparent fascination to death and death of a beautiful muse has fascinated artists writers. She has critically examined and deconstructed the thoughts and ideas of artists such as Gabriel von Max, Ferdinand Hodler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and authors such as Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens and Emily Bronte, to the motives and interpreted meanings of self destruction by real life individuals such as Alice James, sister of Henry James the author and Charlotte Stieglitz, wife of the poet Heinrich Stieglitz.