Bearing the dead : the British culture of mourning from the enlightenment to Victoria / Esther Schor.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schor, Esther H.

Series:

Literature in history (Princeton, N.J.)

Literature in history

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Mourning customs--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Mourning customs.

English literature--18th century--History and criticism.

Mourning customs--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Literature and history--Great Britain.

Literature and history.

Mourning customs in literature.

Grief in literature.

Death in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (301 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1994.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Esther Schor tells us about the persistence of the dead, about why they still matter long after we emerge from grief and accept our loss. Mourning as a cultural phenomenon has become opaque to us in the twentieth century, Schor argues. This book is an effort to recover the culture of mourning that thrived in English society from the Enlightenment through the Romantic Age, and to recapture its meaning. Mourning appears here as the social diffusion of grief through sympathy, as a force that constitutes communities and helps us to conceptualize history. In the textual and social practices of the British Enlightenment and its early nineteenth-century heirs, Schor uncovers the ways in which mourning mediated between received ideas of virtue, both classical and Christian, and a burgeoning, property-based commercial society. The circulation of sympathies maps the means by which both valued things and values themselves are distributed within a culture. Delving into philosophy, politics, economics, and social history as well as literary texts, Schor traces a shift in the British discourse of mourning in the wake of the French Revolution: What begins as a way to effect a moral consensus in society turns into a means of conceiving and bringing forth history.

Contents:

Front matter

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

PART I: A CENTURY OF TEARS

PART II: AUTHENTIC EPITAPHS

EPILOGUE

NOTES

INDEX

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [241]-279) and index.

ISBN:

9786612752063

9781400807147

140080714X

9781282752061

1282752065

9781400821488

1400821487

9781400813339

1400813336

OCLC:

700688686