The essays in this collection focus on representations from the Anglo-Saxon period through the 17th century of how men and women grieve, examining the topic in relation to both the literature and visual arts of England, France, Italy and Germany. The volume's inclusion of Anglo-Saxon, later medieval, and Renaissance texts illustrates how grief ...
From Langston Hughes's lynch poems to Sylvia Plath's father elegies, modern poetry has tried to find a language of mourning in an age of mass death, religious doubt and forgotten ritual. For this reason, Jahan Ramazani argues, the elegy, one of the most ancient of poetic genres, has remained one of the most vital to modern poets. Through readings ...
American and British poetry, music, and visual art born of World Wars I and II. World War I is widely considered "the Great War" and World War II, "the Good War." Janis Stout thinks of them as two parts of a whole that continues to engage historians and literary scholars searching for an understanding of both the actual war experiences and the ...
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 ...
In The Mourning Voice, Nicole Loraux presents a radical challenge to what has become the dominant view of tragedy in recent years: the view that tragedy is primarily a civic phenomenon, infused with Athenian political ideology, that envisions its spectators first and foremost as citizens, members of the political collective. Instead, Loraux ...
In "Mourning Modernity", Seth Moglen argues that American literary modernism is, at its heart, an effort to mourn for the injuries inflicted by modern capitalism. He demonstrates that the most celebrated literary movement of the 20th century is structured by a deep conflict between political hope and despair - between the fear that alienation and ...
In early modern England, religious sorrow was seen as a form of spiritual dialogue between the soul and God, expressing how divine grace operates at the level of human emotion. Through close readings of both Protestant and Catholic poetry, Kuchar explains how the discourses of 'devout melancholy' helped generate some of the most engaging religious ...
Sam Durrant's powerfully original book compares the ways in which the novels of J. M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and ToniMorrison memorialize the traumatic histories of racial oppression that continue to haunt our postcolonial era. The works examined bear witness to the colonization of the NewWorld, U.S. slavery, and South African apartheid, ...
The Prose Elegy considers the works of American and British fiction writers to reveal how the traditional English poetic elegy expanded and evolved to include prose and to deal not only with death but also with other forms of loss. Focusing on individual works ranging from Henry James to Joan Didion, the author explores both the forms the elegy ...
An examination of the preponderance of death and funerary and mourning rituals in the African American expressive tradition. Anissa Wardi argues that the American South represents an unmarked graveyard that is simultaneously the sacred locus of the ancestor and a memorial to their suffering.
In recent years the German-Jewish critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin has come to be regarded as one of the leading intellectual figures of the 20th century. Yet much of his work, particularly his theoretical writing, remains elusive. This book offers a new, comprehensive interpretation of Benjamin's "oeuvre", focusing on the central ideas of ...
In Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England Patricia Phillippy examines the crucial literal and figurative roles played by women in death and mourning during the early modern period. By examining early modern funerary, liturgical and lamentational practices, as well as diaries, poems and plays, she illustrates the consistent ...
This book reveals the strain of a moment in American cultural history that led several remarkable writers - including Emerson, Warner, and Melville - to render the stark rupture of loss in innovative ways. Pushing Protestant culture's sense of loss into secular terrain, these three key writers rejected Calvinist and sentimental models of ...
Tracing the proliferation of forms of mourning and memorial across a century increasingly concerned with their historical and temporal significance, "Arranging Grief" offers a much-needed new view of the aesthetic, social, and political implications of emotion. Considering a diversity of texts, including mourning manuals, sermons, memorial tracts, ...
Examining the funerary elegy in the context of early modern funerary ritual, this book also analyzes the political, aesthetic, moral, and religious developments in the period 1606-1660 and discusses the works of Donne, Jonson, Milton and Early Modern women's writing. Brady discusses both death and the body, combining literary theory, social and ...
Where is the pleasure in tragedy? This question, how suffering and sorrow become the stuff of aesthetic delight, is at the center of Charles Segal's new book, which collects and expands his recent explorations of Euripides' art. "Alcestis, Hippolytus," and "Hecuba," the three early plays interpreted here, are linked by common themes of violence, ...
A comprehensive view of Benjamin's achievement, focusing on the central ideas of mourning and melancholia, developed in Benjamin's early work, "Origin of German Tragic Drama" (1928). Pensky sees the contradictions in Benjamin's thought as part of the melancholy way of seeing.
"A compelling, massively researched psychoanalytic study of the inability to mourn in Melville, Twain and Hemingway, and its roots in maternal loss".--Ann Douglas, author of TERRIBLE HONESTY: MONGREL MANHATTAN IN THE 1920S. "This insightful text is recommended for all students of American culture and literature".--CHOICE.
In this penetrating and compelling reinterpretation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Kevin Crotty explores the connection between the "poetic" nature of supplication on the one hand, and, on the other, the importance of supplication in the structure and poetics of the two epics. The supplicant's attempt to rouse pity by calling to mind a vivid sense ...
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