Graveyards: A History of Living with the Dead moves from the Pyramids of Giza to the garden cemetery movement to contemporary memorial culture, tracing how societies across history have translated grief, politics, and belief into built form.
About This Book
Every civilisation confronts the same question: what do we do with the dead? Roger Luckhurst's answer is not a single history but a layered one — part architectural survey, part cultural analysis, part literary investigation. The book ranges across early burial practices, the rise of necropolises and catacombs, the crisis of urban overcrowding in nineteenth-century cities, grave-robbing, monumental commemorations of rulers and war dead, and the evolution of modern memorial culture. Luckhurst also attends to the cultural afterlives of graveyards in art, film, television, and literature, grounding these representations in their specific social and historical contexts. The result is a work that treats cemetery design and mortuary culture as serious subjects of architectural and humanistic inquiry.
Key Features
- 240 pages of illustrated cultural and architectural history spanning ancient burial sites to modern memorial landscapes, including memento mori paintings, gravestones, effigies, artistic visions of the underworld, and film stills
- Written by Roger Luckhurst
- Published by Thames & Hudson, ISBN 9780500027707
What You'll Discover
- How the spatial and architectural logic of burial — from Roman columbaria to garden cemeteries — reflects shifting attitudes toward death, class, and civic identity
- The social history of grave-robbing and the perilous overcrowding of urban burial grounds in the nineteenth century, and the urban planning responses they provoked
- How monuments erected for deceased rulers, soldiers, and war dead constitute a distinct typology within memorial architecture and landscape design
- The persistent presence of graveyard imagery across literature, art, horror film, and television — examined alongside the physical sites that generated them
About the Author
Roger Luckhurst is a scholar whose work spans cultural history, literature, and the history of ideas. His research engages seriously with the social and symbolic dimensions of spaces that other disciplines tend to treat as marginal.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 240
- Dimensions: 187 x 268 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9780500027707
- Publisher: Thames & Hudson
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects, landscape designers, and cultural historians with an interest in memorial architecture, cemetery design, and the spatial history of death across cultures.