The English Poetic Epitaph : Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth / Joshua Scodel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Scodel, Joshua, Author.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (432 p.) : 7 halftones

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, [2019]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

English poets from Jonson to Wordsworth used poetic epitaphs-poems inscribed or purporting to be inscribed upon tombs-to express their views concerning the p,ower and limitations of poetry as a response to human mortality. In the first major study of the English poetic epitaph, Joshua Scodel examines the genre's once vital role in the social construction of the dead, arguing that the poetic epitaph's changing representations of the deceased are inseparable from changing relations among the living. Drawing upon genre theory, social and cultural history, and anthropology, Scodel situates the development of the genre from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth century within the central conflicts of English collective life.He shows how such writers as Jonson, Donne, Carew, Crashaw, Herrick, Marvell, Cowley, Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Gray, and Wordsworth transform generic conventions in order to create their individual epitaphic poetics.Readers interested in English literary history, cultural poetics, comparative literature, the history of attitudes toward death, and the relationship between literature and the visual arts will find The English Poetic Epitaph fascinating reading.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART 1. BENJONSON AND THE EPITAPHIC TRADITION

Chapter 1. Monumental Poetics: The Epitaph and the Tomb

Chapter 2. Much in Little: The Poetics of Brevity

Chapter 3. Mourning and Praise: The Elegy and Epitaph

PART 2. CONFLICT AND COMMEMORATION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY EPITAPH

Chapter 4. Reconceiving the Dead: Donne and Carew on Donne

Chapter 5. Praising Honest Men: Social and Religious Tensions in the Early and Mid- Seventeenth-Century Epitaph

Chapter 6. Herrick and the Epitaph of Retreat

Chapter 7. The Politics of Nostalgia in the Late Seventeenth-Century Epitaph

PART 3. NEW SUBJECTS, NEW READERS: THE EIGHTEENTH- AND EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY EPITAPH

Chapter 8. "Your Distance Keep": Pope's Epitaphs upon Himself

Chapter 9. Grafting Fame: Pope and the Dilemmas of Epitaphic Praise

Chapter 10. "Kindred Spirits": The Proper Reader in the Mid-Eighteenth- to Early Nineteenth-Century Epitaph

Chapter 11. Praising Honest Creatures: Paternalist Commemoration from the Mid Eighteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century

Chapter 12. Wordsworth and the End of the Epitaphic Tradition

Epilogue

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Feb 2020)

ISBN:

1-5017-3778-3

OCLC:

1143814344