The American Puritan elegy : a literary and cultural study / / Jeffrey A. Hammond

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910827860703321
• Autore: Safe Driver A. D. I
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: New York, : Cambridge University Press, 2000
• ISBN: 1-107-11854-9; 1-280-15457-8; 0-511-11816-3; 0-511-01807-X; 0-511-15432-1; 0-511-30366-1; 0-511-48551-4; 0-511-04898-X
• Edizione: [1st ed.]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (xv, 264 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)
• Collana: Cambridge studies in American literature and culture
• Disciplina: 811.009/3548
• Soggetti: Elegiac poetry, American - History and criticism; American poetry - Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775 - History and criticism; American poetry - Puritan authors - History and criticism; American poetry - New England - History and criticism; Literature and anthropology - New England - History; Christianity and literature - New England - History; Puritans - New England - Intellectual life; Death in literature; Grief in literature
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. 240-255) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: 1. Monuments enduring and otherwise -- 2. Toward an anthropology of Puritan reading -- 3. Weep for yourselves: the Puritan theology of mourning -- 4. This potent fence: the holy sin of grief -- 5. Lord, is it I?: Christic saints and apostolic mourners -- 6. Diffusing all by pattern: the reading of saintly lives -- Epilogue: Aestheticizing loss.
• Sommario/riassunto: Jeffrey Hammond's study takes an anthropological approach to the most popular form of poetry in early New England - the funeral elegy. Hammond reconstructs the historical, theological and cultural contexts of these poems to demonstrate how they responded to a specific process of mourning defined by Puritan views on death and grief. The elegies emerge, he argues not as 'poems' to be read and appreciated in a post-romantic sense, but as performative scripts that consoled readers by shaping their experience of loss in accordance with theological expectation. Read in the framework of their own time and place, the elegies shed light on the emotional dimension of Puritanism and the important role of ritual in Puritan culture. Hammond's book reassesses a body of poems whose importance on their own time has been obscured by almost total neglect in ours. It represents the first full-length study of its kind in English.