American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to WhitmanU of Minnesota Press - 352 頁 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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第 1 到 5 筆結果,共 41 筆
第 1 頁
... seek to apprehend the ultimate, most unknowable condition of privacy, while pointing, in their language of loss, toward the sheer commonality of human experience. Elegy is a genre that enables fantasies about worlds we cannot yet reach ...
... seek to apprehend the ultimate, most unknowable condition of privacy, while pointing, in their language of loss, toward the sheer commonality of human experience. Elegy is a genre that enables fantasies about worlds we cannot yet reach ...
第 18 頁
... seeks to escape the dead weight of generations, African-American elegists must struggle to preserve traces of the severed affiliations from which they suffer disproportionately. For many, and especially for slaves, to mourn publicly at ...
... seeks to escape the dead weight of generations, African-American elegists must struggle to preserve traces of the severed affiliations from which they suffer disproportionately. For many, and especially for slaves, to mourn publicly at ...
第 19 頁
... seeks variously both to preserve and to cancel through the unfolding of lyrical subjectivity. Less well remarked is Whitman's location of lyrical subjectivity in the figure of the elegist: the “lone singer, wonderful, causing tears ...
... seeks variously both to preserve and to cancel through the unfolding of lyrical subjectivity. Less well remarked is Whitman's location of lyrical subjectivity in the figure of the elegist: the “lone singer, wonderful, causing tears ...
第 21 頁
... seeks to reveal, as Fredric Jameson puts it, “the continuity between our psychic life and that of primitive peoples.” For Gates, studying the canon-defining work of African-American genres (“the repetition and revision of shared ...
... seeks to reveal, as Fredric Jameson puts it, “the continuity between our psychic life and that of primitive peoples.” For Gates, studying the canon-defining work of African-American genres (“the repetition and revision of shared ...
第 26 頁
... seek and condemn, as if literature were merely a repository for evidence of the faults and crimes of earlier generations. This often has the unintended and unfortunate effect of hampering rather than enhancing possibilities for both ...
... seek and condemn, as if literature were merely a repository for evidence of the faults and crimes of earlier generations. This often has the unintended and unfortunate effect of hampering rather than enhancing possibilities for both ...
內容
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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常見字詞
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