Grief and Genre in American Literature, 1790-1870

Grief and Genre in American Literature, 1790-1870 PDF Author: Desirée Henderson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317124480
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Focusing on the role of genre in the formation of dominant conceptions of death and dying, Desirée Henderson examines literary texts and social spaces devoted to death and mourning in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. Henderson shows how William Hill Brown, Susanna Rowson, and Hannah Webster borrowed from and challenged funeral sermon conventions in their novelistic portrayals of the deaths of fallen women; contrasts the eulogies for George Washington with William Apess's "Eulogy for King Philip" to expose conflicts between national ideology and indigenous history; examines Frederick Douglass's use of the slave cemetery to represent the costs of slavery for African American families; suggests that the ideas about democracy materialized in Civil War cemeteries and monuments influenced Walt Whitman's war elegies; and offers new contexts for analyzing Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar and Emily Dickinson's poetry as works that explore the consequences of female writers claiming authority over the mourning process. Informed by extensive archival research, Henderson's study eloquently speaks to the ways in which authors adopted, revised, or rejected the conventions of memorial literature, choices that disclose their location within decisive debates about appropriate gender roles and sexual practices, national identity and citizenship, the consequences of slavery, the nature of democratic representation, and structures of authorship and literary authority.

Grief and Genre in American Literature, 1790-1870

Grief and Genre in American Literature, 1790-1870 PDF Author: Desirée Henderson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317124480
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description
Focusing on the role of genre in the formation of dominant conceptions of death and dying, Desirée Henderson examines literary texts and social spaces devoted to death and mourning in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. Henderson shows how William Hill Brown, Susanna Rowson, and Hannah Webster borrowed from and challenged funeral sermon conventions in their novelistic portrayals of the deaths of fallen women; contrasts the eulogies for George Washington with William Apess's "Eulogy for King Philip" to expose conflicts between national ideology and indigenous history; examines Frederick Douglass's use of the slave cemetery to represent the costs of slavery for African American families; suggests that the ideas about democracy materialized in Civil War cemeteries and monuments influenced Walt Whitman's war elegies; and offers new contexts for analyzing Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar and Emily Dickinson's poetry as works that explore the consequences of female writers claiming authority over the mourning process. Informed by extensive archival research, Henderson's study eloquently speaks to the ways in which authors adopted, revised, or rejected the conventions of memorial literature, choices that disclose their location within decisive debates about appropriate gender roles and sexual practices, national identity and citizenship, the consequences of slavery, the nature of democratic representation, and structures of authorship and literary authority.

Dickinson Unbound

Dickinson Unbound PDF Author: Alexandra Socarides
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190240830
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
In Dickinson Unbound, Alexandra Socarides takes readers on a journey through the actual steps and stages of Emily Dickinson's creative process. In chapters that deftly balance attention to manuscripts, readings of poems, and a consideration of literary and material culture, Socarides takes up each of the five major stages of Dickinson's writing career: copying poems onto folded sheets of stationery; inserting and embedding poems into correspondence; sewing sheets together to make fascicles; scattering loose sheets; and copying lines on often torn and discarded pieces of household paper. In so doing, Socarides reveals a Dickinsonian poetics starkly different from those regularly narrated by literary history. Here, Dickinson is transformed from an elusive poetic genius whose poems we have interpreted in a vacuum into an author who employed surprising (and, at times, surprisingly conventional) methods to wholly new effect. Dickinson Unbound gives us a Dickinson at once more accessible and more complex than previously imagined. As the first authoritative study of Dickinson's material and compositional methods, this book not only transforms our ways of reading Dickinson, but advocates for a critical methodology that insists on the study of manuscripts, composition, and material culture for poetry of the nineteenth century and thereafter.

Character and Mourning

Character and Mourning PDF Author: Erin Penner
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813942985
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
In response to the devastating trauma of World War I, British and American authors wrote about grief. The need to articulate loss inspired moving novels by Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. Woolf criticized the role of Britain in the "war to end all wars," and Faulkner recognized in postwar France a devastation of land and people he found familiar from his life in a Mississippi still recovering from the American Civil War. In Character and Mourning, Erin Penner shows how these two modernist novelists took on the challenge of rewriting the literature of mourning for a new and difficult era. Faulkner and Woolf address the massive war losses from the perspective of the noncombatant, thus reimagining modern mourning. By refusing to let war poets dominate the larger cultural portrait of the postwar period, these novelists negotiated a relationship between soldiers and civilians—a relationship that was crucial once the war had ended. Highlighting their sustained attention to elegiac reinvention over the course of their writing careers—from Jacob’s Room to The Waves, from The Sound and the Fury to Go Down, Moses—Penner moves beyond biographical and stylistic differences to recognize Faulkner and Woolf’s shared role in reshaping elegiac literature in the period following the First World War.

Walt Whitman in Context

Walt Whitman in Context PDF Author: Joanna Levin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108314473
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
Walt Whitman is a poet of contexts. His poetic practice was one of observing, absorbing, and then reflecting the world around him. Walt Whitman in Context provides brief, provocative explorations of thirty-eight different contexts - geographic, literary, cultural, and political - through which to engage Whitman's life and work. Written by distinguished scholars of Whitman and nineteenth-century American literature and culture, this collection synthesizes scholarly and historical sources and brings together new readings and original research.

The Rich Earth between Us

The Rich Earth between Us PDF Author: Shelby Johnson
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146967792X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
In this theory-rich study, Shelby Johnson analyzes the works of Black and Indigenous writers in the Atlantic World, examining how their literary production informs "modes of being" that confronted violent colonial times. Johnson particularly assesses how these authors connected to places—whether real or imagined—and how those connections enabled them to make worlds in spite of the violence of slavery and settler colonialism. Johnson engages with works written in a period engulfed by the extraordinary political and social upheavals of the Age of Revolution and Indian Removal, and these texts—which include not only sermons, life writing, and periodicals but also descriptions of embodied and oral knowledge, as well as material objects—register defiance to land removal and other forms of violence. In studying writers of color during this era, Johnson probes the histories of their lived environment and of the earth itself—its limits, its finite resources, and its metaphoric mortality—in a way that offers new insights on what it means to imagine sustainable connections to the ground on which we walk.

Herman Melville

Herman Melville PDF Author: Corey Evan Thompson
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476676321
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
This reference work covers both Herman Melville's life and writings. It includes a biography and detailed information on his works, on the important themes contained therein, and on the significant people and places in his life. The appendices include suggestions for further reading of both literary and cultural criticism, an essay on Melville's lasting cultural influence, and information on both the fictional ships in his works and the real-life ones on which he sailed.

Transatlantic Conversations

Transatlantic Conversations PDF Author: Beth Lynne Lueck
Publisher: Becoming Modern: New Nineteent
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
How American women authors interacted as writers, activists, and reformers in Europe and the Caribbean during the nineteenth century

The Mississippi Quarterly

The Mississippi Quarterly PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 670

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Book Description


Notes and Queries

Notes and Queries PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic journals
Languages : en
Pages : 658

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Book Description


Popular Nineteenth-century American Women Writers and the Literary Marketplace

Popular Nineteenth-century American Women Writers and the Literary Marketplace PDF Author: Earl Frank Yarington
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 522

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Book Description
Wide-ranging, admirably researched, and accessible, this volume of essays locates women writers firmly in the center of the hurly-burly of literary and economic developments that made up the literary marketplace in nineteenth-century America. â "Dr. Joanne Dobson, independent scholar and novelist. This remarkable collection by editors Earl Yarington and Mary De Jong contributes richly to the ongoing recovery of the works and methods of highly popular American women writers of the nineteenth century. Augmenting the body of scholarship on professional women writers, these essays showcase the ways in which best-selling female authors met the demands of a burgeoning literary marketplace. This collection provides striking insights into an industry that was anything but sedate or genteel. Sensitive to hair-trigger shifts in the marketplace, nineteenth-century women writers refined their strategies for meeting consumer desires. Professional writers like Stowe, Hale, Warner, Holmes and Southworth are recognized here for their attunement to audience trends, tastes and temperament. They responded with a prodigious output of novels, short fiction, non-fiction and serialized features that bolstered the American publishing industry. The contributors to this much-needed volume have succeeded in re-acquainting later generations with the extensive output and skilled professionalism of writers whose works once covered parlor library tables. This is an important scholarly achievement. â "Susan I. Gatti, Indiana University of PA Includes essays on Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Grace Greenwood, Anna Warner, E. D. E. N. Southworth, Alcott, Grace King, Frances Harper, Chopin, Winnifred Eaton, and other successful authors.