As modern society’s routine sequestration of death and grief is increasingly replaced by late-modern society’s growing concern with existential issues and emotionality, this book explores grief as a social emotion, bringing together contributions from scholars across the social sciences and humanities to examine its social and cultural aspects. Thematically organised in order to consider the historical changes in our understanding of grief, literary treatments of grief, contemporary forms of grief and grief as a perspective from which to engage in critique of society, it provides insights into the sociality of grief and will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory and cultural studies with interests in the emotions and social pathologies.

Michael Hviid Jacobsen is Professor of Sociology at Aalborg University, Denmark. He is the editor of The Poetics of Crime and Postmortal Society and Critical and Cultural Interactionism, and co-editor of The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman, Encountering the Everyday, The Transformation of Modernity, Utopia: Social Theory and the Future, Liquid Criminology, Imaginative Methodologies: The Poetic Imagination in the Social Sciences, and Towards a Criminology of Emotions.

Anders Petersen is Associate Professor of Sociology at Aalborg University, Denmark. He is the co-author of Late Modern Subjectivity and its Discontents and the co-editor of The Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization, Imaginative Methodologies: The Poetic Imagination in the Social Sciences and Critical Happiness Studies.