1: Introduction to Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture -- 2: “To Show the Problem Inside and Out”: Representations of Mental Illness and Suicide in Eric Steel’s The Bridge -- 3: Twenty-First Century Digital Snuff: The Circulation of Images and Videos of Real Death Online -- 4: Streaming death: terrorist violence and the digital afterlife of difficult death -- 5: ‘Death. Carnage. Chaos’: mortality and mountaineering on-screen, and on the roof of the world -- 6: Bodies on the Battlefield: Death and Combat in Band of Brothers -- 7: Melissa Merchant and Simon Order - Representing Fatal Violence in AMC’s The Walking Dead: The Role of Legitimation, Graphicness and Explicitness -- 8: Are Normative Death Narratives Celebrated, Reinforced, or Disrupted in Popular Media? A Critical Discourse Analysis of Coco and Soul -- 9: Hashtag feminism: challenging rape and femicide in South Africa -- 10: A Weaponized Landscape: Hart Island’s Geography of Denial -- 11: Shakespeare: Difficult Dead Celebrity Child -- 12: There is nothing like a dead man to demand existence’ (Antonin Artaud) -- 13: Difficult Deaths and Awkward Agendas: How Mainstream News Media Negotiate Coverage of Politically Dissonant Victims -- 14: Dissected, torn, and exposed: the death and remains of the Jack the Ripper victims in the Illustrated Police News -- 15: Photographing Death to Save Photojournalism Mafia Homicides in Letizia Battaglia's “Archive of Blood” -- 16: Economies of Mortalities: Ageism and Disposability During the Covid-19 Pandemic -- 17: Reflecting grief during a pandemic: online UK newspapers’ reportage and researchers’ experiences -- 18: Conclusion to Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture. .

This book responds to a growing interest in death, dying and the dead within and beyond the field of death studies. The collection defines an understanding of ‘difficult death’ and examines the differences between death, dying and the dead, as well as exploring the ethical challenges of researching death in mediated form. The collection is attendant to the ways in which difficult deaths are imbricated in power structures both before and after they become mediatised in culture. As such, the work navigates the many political and social complexities and inequalities ­– what might be deemed the difficulties – of death, dying and the dead. The book seeks to expand understandings of the difficulty of death in media and culture through a wide range of chapters from different contexts focused on literature, film, television, and in online environments, as well as several chapters examining news reportage of difficult deaths. .