The Wedding of the Dead: Ritual, Poetics, and Popular Culture in Transylvania

The Wedding of the Dead: Ritual, Poetics, and Popular Culture in Transylvania by Gail Kligman explores how life-cycle rituals—weddings, funerals, and the symbolic “death-weddings” of the young unmarried dead—both express and reshape community life in Maramureș, an isolated region of northern Transylvania. Moving far beyond the gothic myth of Dracula, Kligman situates ritual within the historical and political upheavals of twentieth-century Romania, from Habsburg rule to socialist centraliza...