American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to WhitmanU of Minnesota Press - 352 من الصفحات 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. |
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الصفحة 1
... loss , they measure out the distance between emotion and convention , between local disruptions of bereavement and long traditions of resignation . In their figures of death , elegies seek to apprehend the ultimate , most unknowable ...
... loss , they measure out the distance between emotion and convention , between local disruptions of bereavement and long traditions of resignation . In their figures of death , elegies seek to apprehend the ultimate , most unknowable ...
الصفحة 2
... loss of susceptibility to self - narration in the American context . For the heightened self - reflexiveness of elegiac convention — the ten- dency , for example , to figure acts of mourning in terms of poetic com- petition , to ...
... loss of susceptibility to self - narration in the American context . For the heightened self - reflexiveness of elegiac convention — the ten- dency , for example , to figure acts of mourning in terms of poetic com- petition , to ...
الصفحة 9
... losses contrasts sharply with the prolific work of local elegists , of which she takes notice in her self - appointed role as civic conscience . “ Our soil , " she writes in the seventh of her fourteen letters on civic virtue to The New ...
... losses contrasts sharply with the prolific work of local elegists , of which she takes notice in her self - appointed role as civic conscience . “ Our soil , " she writes in the seventh of her fourteen letters on civic virtue to The New ...
الصفحة 11
... loss of her parents , Portland , 1823. Silk , chenille , pencil , paint , and ink on silk . Courtesy of the Hingham Historical Society , Hingham , Massachusetts . in which he departs dramatically from temporal order . For. INTRODUCTION II.
... loss of her parents , Portland , 1823. Silk , chenille , pencil , paint , and ink on silk . Courtesy of the Hingham Historical Society , Hingham , Massachusetts . in which he departs dramatically from temporal order . For. INTRODUCTION II.
الصفحة 12
... loss , Twain substitutes the remote order of myth . The poem begins : “ In a fair valley — oh , how long ago , how ... loss ; some refuse to believe that it was ever there . For the priests , however , the memory of the loss can barely ...
... loss , Twain substitutes the remote order of myth . The poem begins : “ In a fair valley — oh , how long ago , how ... loss ; some refuse to believe that it was ever there . For the priests , however , the memory of the loss can barely ...
المحتوى
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 |
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عبارات ومصطلحات مألوفة
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