Representations of death in nineteenth-century US writing and culture / edited by Lucy E. Frank, University of Warwick, UK.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Frank, Lucy Elizabeth, 1973- editor.

Series:

Warwick studies in the humanities.

Warwick Studies in the Humanities

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

American literature.

Death in literature.

Death--Social aspects--United States--History--19th century.

Death.

Mourning customs in literature.

Indians in literature.

African Americans in literature.

Children in literature.

Suicide in literature.

United States--Intellectual life--19th century.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (247 pages) : illustrations.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

London : Routledge, 2018.

Summary:

"From the famous deathbed scene of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Little Eva to Mark Twain's parodically morbid poetess Emmeline Grangerford, a preoccupation with human finitude informs the texture of nineteenth-century US writing. This collection traces the vicissitudes of this cultural preoccupation with the subject of death and examines how mortality served paradoxically as a site on which identity and subjectivity were productively rethought. Contributors from North America and the United Kingdom, representing the fields of literature, theatre history, and American studies, analyze the sexual, social, and epistemological boundaries implicit in nineteenth-century America's obsession with death, while also seeking to give a voice to the strategies by which these boundaries were interrogated and displaced. Topics include race- and gender-based investigations into the textual representation of death, imaginative constructions and re-constructions of social practice with regard to loss and memorialisation, and literary re-conceptualisations of death forced by personal and national trauma."--Provided by publisher.

Contents:

part, 1 Death, Citizenship and the Politics of Mourning

chapter Introduction Curious Dreams

Representations of Death in Nineteenth-Century US Writing and Culture / Lucy Frank

chapter 1 Chief Seattle's Afterlife

Mourning and Cross-Cultural Synthesis in Nineteenth-Century America / John J. Kucich

chapter 2 Escaping the 'benumbing influence of a present embodied death'

The Politics of Mourning in 1850s African-American Writing / Jeffrey Steele

chapter 3 Representative Mournfulness

Nation and Race in the Time of Lincoln / Dana Luciano

chapter 4 'Stock in dead folk'

The Value of Black Mortality in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 1 / Stephen Shapiro

chapter 5 'I cannot bear to be hurted any more'

Suicide as Dialectical Ideological Sign in Nineteenth-Century American Realism / Kevin Grauke

chapter 6 Rewriting the Myth of Black Mortality

W.E.B. Du Bois and Charles W. Chesnutt / Joanne van der Woude

part, 2 Signatures and Elegies

chapter 7 'I think I was enchanted'

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Haunting of American Women Poets / Alison Chapman

chapter 8 God's Will, Not Mine

Child Death as a Theodicean Problem in Poetry by Nineteenth-Century American Women / Paula Bernat Bennett

chapter 9 'The little coffin'

Anthologies, Conventions and Dead Children / Jessica F. Roberts

part, 3 Cultures of Death

chapter 10 The Fashion of Mourning / Ann Schofield

chapter 11 'At a distance from the scene of the atrocity'

Death and Detachment in Poe's 'The Mystery of Marie Rogêt' / Elizabeth Carolyn Miller

chapter 12 Spectres on the New York Stage

The (Pepper's) Ghost Craze of 1863 / Dassia N. Posner

chapter 13 Medusa's Blinding Art

Mesmerism and Female Artistic Agency in Louisa May Alcott's 'A Pair of Eyes; or, Modern Magic' / Ann Heilmann

chapter 14 'To surprise immortality'

Spiritualism and Shakerism in William Dean Howells's The Undiscovered Country / Kelly Richardson.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references at the end of each chapters and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-351-15024-3

1-351-15023-5

9781351150248

OCLC:

1019720775