American Elegy

American Elegy PDF

Author: Max Cavitch

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published:

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 1452909180

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The most widely practiced and read form of verse in America, “elegies are poems about being left behind,” writes Max Cavitch. American Elegy is the history of a diverse people’s poetic experience of mourning and of mortality’s profound challenge to creative living. By telling this history in political, psychological, and aesthetic terms, American Elegy powerfully reconnects the study of early American poetry to the broadest currents of literary and cultural criticism. Cavitch begins by considering eighteenth-century elegists such as Franklin, Bradstreet, Mather, Wheatley, Freneau, and Annis Stockton, highlighting their defiance of boundaries—between public and private, male and female, rational and sentimental—and demonstrating how closely intertwined the work of mourning and the work of nationalism were in the revolutionary era. He then turns to elegy’s adaptations during the market-driven Jacksonian age, including more obliquely elegiac poems like those of William Cullen Bryant and the popular child elegies of Emerson, Lydia Sigourney, and others. Devoting unprecedented attention to the early African-American elegy, Cavitch discusses poems written by free blacks and slaves, as well as white abolitionists, seeing in them the development of an African-American genealogical imagination. In addition to a major new reading of Whitman’s great elegy for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Cavitch takes up less familiar passages from Whitman as well as Melville’s and Lazarus’s poems following Lincoln’s death. American Elegy offers critical and often poignant insights into the place of mourning in American culture. Cavitch examines literary responses to historical events—such as the American Revolution, Native American removal, African-American slavery, and the Civil War—and illuminates the states of loss, hope, desire, and love in American studies today. Max Cavitch is assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.

Fulke Greville and the Culture of the English Renaissance

Fulke Greville and the Culture of the English Renaissance PDF

Author: Russ Leo

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2019-02-06

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0198823444

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Fulke Greville's reputation has always been overshadowed by that of his more famous friend, Philip Sidney, a legacy due in part to Greville's complex moulding of his authorial persona as Achates to Sidney's Aeneas, and in part to the formidable complexity of his poetry and prose. This volume seeks to vindicate Greville's 'obscurity' as an intrinsic feature of his poetic thinking, and as a privileged site of interpretation. The seventeen essays shed new light on Greville's poetry, philosophy, and dramatic work. They investigate his examination of monarchy and sovereignty; grace, salvation, and the nature of evil; the power of poetry and the vagaries of desire, and they offer a reconsideration of his reputation and afterlife in his own century, and beyond. The volume explores the connections between poetic form and philosophy, and argues that Greville's poetic experiments and meditations on form convey penetrating, and strikingly original contributions to poetics, political thought, and philosophy. Highlighting stylistic features of his poetic style, such as his mastery of the caesura and of the feminine ending; his love of paradox, ambiguity, and double meanings; his complex metaphoricity and dense, challenging syntax, these essays reveal how Greville's work invites us to revisit and rethink many of the orthodoxies about the culture of post-Reformation England, including the shape of political argument, and the forms and boundaries of religious belief and identity.

Telling Tears in the English Renaissance

Telling Tears in the English Renaissance PDF

Author: Marjory E. Lange

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-12-06

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 900447790X

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Tears and weeping are, at once, human universals and socially-constrained phenomena. This volume explores the interface between those two viewpoints by examining medical literature, sermons, and lyric poetry of the 16th and 17th centuries to see how dominant paradigms regarded who could, who must, and who must not weep. These paradigms shifted in some cases radically, during these centuries. Without a clear understanding of how the Renaissance 'read' tears, it is difficult to avoid using our own preconceptions -- often quite different and very misleading. There are five chapters; one on medical and scientific material, two on sermons, and two on different types of lyric.

English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century

English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century PDF

Author: A. Brady

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2006-06-20

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 0230554873

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This book analyzes the political, aesthetic, moral and religious developments in the period 1606-1660 and discusses the works of Donne, Jonson, Milton and early modern women's writing. Brady combines Literary Theory, social and cultural History, Psychology and Anthropology to produce exciting and original readings of neglected source material.

John Cruso of Norwich and Anglo-Dutch Literary Identity in the Seventeenth Century

John Cruso of Norwich and Anglo-Dutch Literary Identity in the Seventeenth Century PDF

Author: Christopher Joby

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 1843846144

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The first book-length biography of John Cruso of Norwich (b. 1592/3), a second-generation migrant poet, translator and military author, that explores ideas and practices of identity formation in the early modern period.John Cruso of Norwich (b. 1592/3), the eldest son of Flemish migrants, was a man of many parts: Dutch and English poet, translator, military author, virtuoso networker, successful merchant and hosier, Dutch church elder and militia captain. This first book-length biography, making extensive use of archival and literary sources, reconstructs the life and work of this multi-talented, self-made man, whose literary oeuvre is marked by its polyvocality. Cruso''s poetry includes a Dutch amplificatio on Psalm 8, some 221 Dutch epigrams, and elegies (one of which frames the most important Anglo-Dutch literary moment in the seventeenth century, a collection of Dutch and Latin elegies which marked the death of the London Dutch church minister, Simeon Ruytinck, and included verses by Constantijn Huygens and Jacob Cats). As a military author, Cruso published five works, in English, including two translations from the French. These works display his knowledge of the canon of classical and Renaissance literature, which, in turn, allowed him to fashion himself as a miles doctus, a learned soldier, and make a contribution to military science in England prior to and during the English Civil Wars. In focusing on the rich and varied life and works of John Cruso, this book also explores ideas and practices of identity formation in the early modern period, as well as allowing Cruso''s life to shed further light on the migrant experience in seventeenth-century Norwich. Joby shows how a second-generation migrant could successfully integrate himself into English society, whilst continuing to engage with his Low Countries heritage.and Jacob Cats). As a military author, Cruso published five works, in English, including two translations from the French. These works display his knowledge of the canon of classical and Renaissance literature, which, in turn, allowed him to fashion himself as a miles doctus, a learned soldier, and make a contribution to military science in England prior to and during the English Civil Wars. In focusing on the rich and varied life and works of John Cruso, this book also explores ideas and practices of identity formation in the early modern period, as well as allowing Cruso''s life to shed further light on the migrant experience in seventeenth-century Norwich. Joby shows how a second-generation migrant could successfully integrate himself into English society, whilst continuing to engage with his Low Countries heritage.and Jacob Cats). As a military author, Cruso published five works, in English, including two translations from the French. These works display his knowledge of the canon of classical and Renaissance literature, which, in turn, allowed him to fashion himself as a miles doctus, a learned soldier, and make a contribution to military science in England prior to and during the English Civil Wars. In focusing on the rich and varied life and works of John Cruso, this book also explores ideas and practices of identity formation in the early modern period, as well as allowing Cruso''s life to shed further light on the migrant experience in seventeenth-century Norwich. Joby shows how a second-generation migrant could successfully integrate himself into English society, whilst continuing to engage with his Low Countries heritage.and Jacob Cats). As a military author, Cruso published five works, in English, including two translations from the French. These works display his knowledge of the canon of classical and Renaissance literature, which, in turn, allowed him to fashion himself as a miles doctus, a learned soldier, and make a contribution to military science in England prior to and during the English Civil Wars. In focusing on the rich and varied life and works of John Cruso, this book also explores ideas and practices of identity formation in the early modern period, as well as allowing Cruso''s life to shed further light on the migrant experience in seventeenth-century Norwich. Joby shows how a second-generation migrant could successfully integrate himself into English society, whilst continuing to engage with his Low Countries heritage.ance literature, which, in turn, allowed him to fashion himself as a miles doctus, a learned soldier, and make a contribution to military science in England prior to and during the English Civil Wars. In focusing on the rich and varied life and works of John Cruso, this book also explores ideas and practices of identity formation in the early modern period, as well as allowing Cruso''s life to shed further light on the migrant experience in seventeenth-century Norwich. Joby shows how a second-generation migrant could successfully integrate himself into English society, whilst continuing to engage with his Low Countries heritage.

The daring muse of the early Stuart funeral elegy

The daring muse of the early Stuart funeral elegy PDF

Author: James Doelman

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2021-03-16

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 1526144204

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The early Stuart funeral elegy was a copious and digressive genre, and exceptional deaths pressed elegists to stretch beyond the usual rhetoric of grief and commemoration. This book engages in a broad reading of the period’s rich trove of funeral elegies, in both manuscript and print, and by poets ranging from the canonical to the anonymous. The book stands apart from earlier studies by its greater focus upon the subjects of funeral elegies (rather than the poets), and how the particular circumstances of death and the immediate contexts affected the poetic response. Individual deaths are understood in relation to each other and other prominent events of the time. While the book covers the period 1603 to 1640, the 1620s stand out as a tumultuous decade in which the genre most fully engaged in matters of political controversy and satire.

Thomas Hardy’s Elegiac Prose and Poetry

Thomas Hardy’s Elegiac Prose and Poetry PDF

Author: Galia Benziman

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-03-28

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 1137507136

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This book examines the transition from traditional to modern elegy through a close study of Thomas Hardy’s oeuvre and its commitment to mourning and remembrance. Hardy is usually read as an avowed elegist who writes against the collective forgetfulness typical of the late-Victorian era. But Hardy, as argued here, is dialectically implicated in the very cultural and psychological amnesia that he resists, as her book demonstrates by expanding the corpus of study beyond the spousal elegies (the “Poems of 1912-1913”) to include a wide variety of poems, novels and short stories that deal with bereavement and mourning. Locating the modern aspect of Hardy’s elegiac writing in this ambivalence and in the subversion of memory as unreliable, the book explores the textual moments at which Hardy challenges binary dichotomies such as forgetting vs. remembering, narcissism vs. unselfish commitment, grief vs. betrayal, the work of mourning vs. melancholia, presence vs. absence. The book's analysis allows us to relate Hardy’s elegiac poetics, and particularly his description of the mourner as a writer, to shifting late-Victorian conceptualizations of death, memory, art, science and gender relations.

Mourning and Panegyric

Mourning and Panegyric PDF

Author: Celeste M. Schenck

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2010-11

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 0271039434

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This work is primarily a genre study, aiming both at enlarging the canon of pastoral texts and at theorizing generical development in a comparative context. Addressed to a general audience of poetry enthusiasts as well as students of genre theory and specialists in the field, the book takes as its examples the twin pastoral genres of funeral elegy and marriage hymns. Schenck establishes in her introduction that the strategies she isolates in elegies and epithalamia govern lyric processes more generally; that in fact every poem might be an epitaph if it pronounces an elegy upon a former poetic self and announces rebirth of the artist as a poet. All poems are genuinely epitaphic in their attempt to record verbally and lastingly the death and implied rebirth of the poet as poet each time he lifts his pen to begin a new poem. The specific forms explored in this book, elegy and epithalamium, serve precisely as model initiatory scenarios. Elegies tend to gesture toward the past, pronouncing an epitaph upon poetic apprenticeship and recovery voice by means of symbolic burial of a forebear. Marriage poems, alternatively, are future-directed, celebrating (as do elegies) passage from virgin to mature state. Both forms aim at circumventing mortality, by apotheosis and deification in the case of the elegy, and by the projection forth of &"issue&" at the end of the marriage poem. Investigation of the symbolic reciprocity of these seemingly distinct forms yields a surprising range of variant forms, extends provocatively Claudio Guillen's theory of genre and counter-genre, and initiates a poetics of pastoral ceremony that has implications for the general study of lyric modes.