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 vii
... thought and expression are his , and the value of the example he has set for the conduct of life is similarly incalculable . Richard Poirier , Myra Jehlen , and Virginia Jackson have been tough and in- spiring critics ; it matters ...
... thought and expression are his , and the value of the example he has set for the conduct of life is similarly incalculable . Richard Poirier , Myra Jehlen , and Virginia Jackson have been tough and in- spiring critics ; it matters ...
الصفحة 11
... thought Twain's burlesque of elegy mercilessly refutes . The credit is all to Huck , the one who cannot write such a poem . Yet the thought returns to Twain after the death of his daughter Olivia in 1896 , prompt- ing him to write an ...
... thought Twain's burlesque of elegy mercilessly refutes . The credit is all to Huck , the one who cannot write such a poem . Yet the thought returns to Twain after the death of his daughter Olivia in 1896 , prompt- ing him to write an ...
الصفحة 19
... thought primarily to fix or objectify relations among texts . Now , we tend to treat genres as objectifications not of textual constituencies but rather of the processes of change that texts undergo historically within categorizing ...
... thought primarily to fix or objectify relations among texts . Now , we tend to treat genres as objectifications not of textual constituencies but rather of the processes of change that texts undergo historically within categorizing ...
الصفحة 22
... thoughts of one another , in that they are both enactments of this “ traversal . ” They are ways of seeking to understand the relation between the singularity of an event ( a poem , a death ) and its inevitable repetition — a relation ...
... thoughts of one another , in that they are both enactments of this “ traversal . ” They are ways of seeking to understand the relation between the singularity of an event ( a poem , a death ) and its inevitable repetition — a relation ...
الصفحة 41
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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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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