Saving Graces: Images of Women in European Cemeteries

Front Cover
W.W. Norton, 1995 - Photography - 114 pages
Many cemeteries in Europe are highly maintained sculpture gardens strewn with shockingly sensual sculptures of women. They are perfect, idealized creations - young, gorgeous, elaborately posed, and beautifully sculpted. Often naked or barely clothed, and consumed with grief for the dead, they are both a stunning and a compelling presence among the other gravestones. David Robinson's exquisite photographs reveal the angelic beauty and mystery of these lifelike sculptures. In her foreword, Joyce Carol Oates explores the many implications of these grief-stricken, extremely provocative female figures -our obsession with mortality, the rituals of mourning, the conflation of death and the erotic, the perfect female form as a male fantasy and a symbol of status.

About the author (1995)

David Robinson lives in San Francisco.

Joyce Carol Oates was born on June 16, 1938 in Lockport, New York. She received a bachelor's degree in English from Syracuse University and a master's degree in English from the University of Wisconsin. She is the author of numerous novels and collections of short stories. Her works include We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, Bellefleur, You Must Remember This, Because It Is Bitter, Because It Is My Heart, Solstice, Marya : A Life, and Give Me Your Heart. She has received numerous awards including the National Book Award for Them, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Lifetime Achievement in American Literature. She was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with her title Lovely, Dark, Deep. She also wrote a series of suspense novels under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith. In 2015, her novel The Accursed became listed as a bestseller on the iBooks chart. She worked as a professor of English at the University of Windsor, before becoming the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. She and her late husband Raymond J. Smith operated a small press and published a literary magazine, The Ontario Review.

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