American elegy : the poetry of mourning from the Puritans to Whitman / Max Cavitch.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cavitch, Max.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Elegiac poetry, American--History and criticism.

Elegiac poetry, American.

American poetry--History and criticism.

American poetry.

Mourning customs in literature.

Grief in literature.

Death in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (362 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, c2007.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

American Elegy reconnects the study of early American poetry to the broadest currents of literary and cultural criticism. Max Cavitch begins by considering eighteenth-century elegists such as Franklin and Bradstreet. He then turns to elegy's adaptations during the Jacksonian age. Devoting unprecedented attention to the early African-American elegy, Cavitch sees in the poems the development of an African-American genealogical imagination.

Contents:

Introduction: leaving poetry behind

Legacy and revision in eighteenth-century Anglo-American elegy

Elegy and the subject of national mourning

Taking care of the dead: custodianship and opposition in antebellum elegy

Elegy's child: Waldo Emerson and the price of generation

Mourning of the disprized: African Americans and elegy from Wheatley to Lincoln

Retrievements out of the night: Whitman and the future of elegy.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 295-333) and index.

ISBN:

0-8166-9885-6

OCLC:

476096189