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 4
... write about anything you choose to give her to write about, just so it was sadful. Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on hand with her “tribute” before he was cold. She called them tributes. The ...
... write about anything you choose to give her to write about, just so it was sadful. Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on hand with her “tribute” before he was cold. She called them tributes. The ...
الصفحة 6
... writes, “were, by their bruitish howlings; and formidable ejulations, accustomed to represent sorrow Tragically, and raise the affection in the mourners; which ought rather to have means used with it, whereby it may be rectified and ...
... writes, “were, by their bruitish howlings; and formidable ejulations, accustomed to represent sorrow Tragically, and raise the affection in the mourners; which ought rather to have means used with it, whereby it may be rectified and ...
الصفحة 9
... writes in the seventh of her fourteen letters on civic virtue to The New-England Courant, “seldom produces any other sort of Poetry,” and, to make matters worse, most of the elegies are “wretchedly Dull and Ridiculous” ( ). She is ...
... writes in the seventh of her fourteen letters on civic virtue to The New-England Courant, “seldom produces any other sort of Poetry,” and, to make matters worse, most of the elegies are “wretchedly Dull and Ridiculous” ( ). She is ...
الصفحة 10
... write an elegy for her, “but I couldn't seem to make it go, somehow” ( ). Huck's inability to engage in what Twain considered to be a debased sentimental tradition of versified lament is a hallmark of his authentic feeling as well ...
... write an elegy for her, “but I couldn't seem to make it go, somehow” ( ). Huck's inability to engage in what Twain considered to be a debased sentimental tradition of versified lament is a hallmark of his authentic feeling as well ...
الصفحة 11
... write such a poem. Yet the thought returns to Twain after the death of his daughter Olivia in , prompting him to write an elegy for her, on the first anniversary of her death, in which he departs dramatically from temporal order ...
... write such a poem. Yet the thought returns to Twain after the death of his daughter Olivia in , prompting him to write an elegy for her, on the first anniversary of her death, in which he departs dramatically from temporal order ...
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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