American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to WhitmanU of Minnesota Press - 352 pages The most widely practiced and read form of verse in America, “elegies are poems about being left behind,” writes Max Cavitch. American Elegy is the history of a diverse people’s poetic experience of mourning and of mortality’s profound challenge to creative living. By telling this history in political, psychological, and aesthetic terms, American Elegy powerfully reconnects the study of early American poetry to the broadest currents of literary and cultural criticism. Cavitch begins by considering eighteenth-century elegists such as Franklin, Bradstreet, Mather, Wheatley, Freneau, and Annis Stockton, highlighting their defiance of boundaries—between public and private, male and female, rational and sentimental—and demonstrating how closely intertwined the work of mourning and the work of nationalism were in the revolutionary era. He then turns to elegy’s adaptations during the market-driven Jacksonian age, including more obliquely elegiac poems like those of William Cullen Bryant and the popular child elegies of Emerson, Lydia Sigourney, and others. Devoting unprecedented attention to the early African-American elegy, Cavitch discusses poems written by free blacks and slaves, as well as white abolitionists, seeing in them the development of an African-American genealogical imagination. In addition to a major new reading of Whitman’s great elegy for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Cavitch takes up less familiar passages from Whitman as well as Melville’s and Lazarus’s poems following Lincoln’s death. American Elegy offers critical and often poignant insights into the place of mourning in American culture. Cavitch examines literary responses to historical events—such as the American Revolution, Native American removal, African-American slavery, and the Civil War—and illuminates the states of loss, hope, desire, and love in American studies today. Max Cavitch is assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 93
Page 3
... relation to all of these conditions , elegy continued to be a highly adaptive discursive resource , not just for mourning the dead but for communicating and managing anxieties in contexts of survival . The thematic and formal diversity ...
... relation to all of these conditions , elegy continued to be a highly adaptive discursive resource , not just for mourning the dead but for communicating and managing anxieties in contexts of survival . The thematic and formal diversity ...
Page 5
... relation between gender and mourning . Proscriptions against the mourning of women , and against mourning like women , are among the most common and enduring in the history of regimentation of Western deathways . From ancient Athens to ...
... relation between gender and mourning . Proscriptions against the mourning of women , and against mourning like women , are among the most common and enduring in the history of regimentation of Western deathways . From ancient Athens to ...
Page 14
... relation to the history of colonial and national so- ciality and institutions , to illuminate the mutually generative relation between certain political and psychoanalytic accounts of mourning , to explore how expressivity in contexts ...
... relation to the history of colonial and national so- ciality and institutions , to illuminate the mutually generative relation between certain political and psychoanalytic accounts of mourning , to explore how expressivity in contexts ...
Page 15
... relations theory- this inaccessible life.23 But one need not have a psychoanalytic world- view to experience mourning , either one's own or that of others , as the mute agony of incorporation , whereby we keep the dead inside our ...
... relations theory- this inaccessible life.23 But one need not have a psychoanalytic world- view to experience mourning , either one's own or that of others , as the mute agony of incorporation , whereby we keep the dead inside our ...
Page 16
... relation to modes of collective action directed against external , essentially imperial encroachments . These modes of collective action are enabled , because legitimated , by a widely shared and remarkably stable faith not only in the ...
... relation to modes of collective action directed against external , essentially imperial encroachments . These modes of collective action are enabled , because legitimated , by a widely shared and remarkably stable faith not only in the ...
Contents
1 | |
1 Legacy and Revision in EighteenthCentury AngloAmerican Elegy | 33 |
2 Elegy and the Subject of National Mourning | 80 |
Custodianship and Opposition in Antebellum Elegy | 108 |
Waldo Emerson and the Price of Generation | 143 |
African Americans and Elegy from Wheatley to Lincoln | 180 |
Whitman and the Future of Elegy | 233 |
Objects | 286 |
Notes | 295 |
Index | 335 |
Other editions - View all
American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman Max Cavitch No preview available - 2007 |
American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman Max Cavitch No preview available - 2007 |
Common terms and phrases
African ambivalence American elegy American Poetry antebellum Boston broadside Brown Bryant calls Cambridge century child contemporary continuity conventional Cotton Mather cultural dead death dream early eighteenth-century elegiac elegists elegy's Essays example experience expression father feeling figure Franklin Freneau funeral genre genre's George George Moses Horton grief helped Ibid idealization imagination Indian James John lament Leaves of Grass letter Library of America Lilacs Lincoln lines literary literature living loss memory Monimba mourners mourning nature pastoral Philip Freneau Phillis Wheatley poem poem's poet poet's poetic political Prose Puritan Ralph Waldo Emerson readers reading relation satire scene seems sense sentimental Sigourney slave slavery social song sorrow soul spiritual Stockton sublime suggests suicide Thanatopsis thee Thomas thou Threnody tion tradition Traubel University Press verse voice Waldo Emerson Walt Whitman Washington Wheatley's Whitefield William William Cullen Bryant writes wrote York
References to this book
Misery's Mathematics: Mourning, Compensation, and Reality in Antebellum ... Peter Balaam No preview available - 2009 |