"This book attempts to set out at least part of the story of how high-style funerary sculpture functioned at the turn of the twentieth century and in the decades immediately after, a subject little investigated to date by scholars. These monuments have not been considered in terms of their wider context and shifting use as objects of consolation, power, and multisensory mystery and wonder. Rather, they have mostly been considered as oddities, a part of an individual artist's oeuvre, a detail of a patron's biography, or as local civic cemetery history. Why did new forms--many of them now produced in bronze rather than stone and placed in architectural settings--arise just at this time, and how did they mesh or clash with the sensibilities of their era? Why was there a gap between the intention of these elite patrons and artists, whose lives were often intertwined in a closed circle, and the way some public audiences received them through the filter of the mass media?"--