- Published: 06/11/2014
- ISBN: 9781847088017
- Granta Books
- 336 pages
Severed
Frances Larson
Our history is littered with heads. Over the centuries, they have decorated our churches, festooned our city walls and filled our museums; they have been props for artists and specimens for laboratory scientists, trophies for soldiers and items of barter. Today, as videos of decapitations circulate online and cryonicists promise that our heads may one day live on without our bodies, the severed head is as contentious and compelling as ever.
From shrunken heads to trophies of war; from memento mori to Damien Hirst’s With Dead Head; from grave-robbing phrenologists to enterprising scientists, Larson explores the bizarre, often gruesome and confounding history of the severed head. Its story is our story.
£9.99
Fascinating... lively, original, important, astounding, well-written: first class in every way
Sunday Times
Wonderfully original... a splendid example of plotting a new brand of history that cuts through conventional categories of science, literature and art
Richard Fortey 'Book of the year
Severed is clever, startling, profoundly informative, delightfully gruesome... Larson writes like an angel
John Simpson
From the Same Author
Undreamed Shores
Frances Larson
In the first decades of the 20th century, five women – Katherine Routledge, Maria Czaplicka, Winifred Blackman, Beatrice Blackwood and Barbara Freire-Marreco – arrived at Oxford to take the newly created Masters in Anthropology. Though their circumstances differed radically, all were intent on visiting and studying remote communities a world away from their own. Through their work, they resisted the prejudices of the male establishment, proving that women could be explorers and scientists, too. In the wastes of Siberia; in the villages and pueblos of the Nile and New Mexico; on Easter Island; and in the uncharted interior of New Guinea, they found new freedoms – yet when they returned to England, loss, madness and self-doubt awaited them.
Frances Larson’s masterful group biography is a revelatory portrait of five hidden heroines of British scholarship.
Frances Larson on Granta.com
Fiction | The Online Edition
Undreamed Shores
Frances Larson
‘Miss C (who is fairly young and pretty) can’t go off by herself with a solitary man, however respectable, to live on the Siberian tundra.’
