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

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910828144203321
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: London : , : Routledge, , 2018
• ISBN: 1-351-15024-3; 1-351-15023-5
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (247 pages) : illustrations
• Collana: Warwick Studies in the Humanities
• Disciplina: 810.93548
• Soggetti: American literature - 19th century - History and criticism; Death in literature; Death - Social aspects - United States - History - 19th century; Mourning customs in literature; Indians in literature; African Americans in literature; Children in literature; Suicide in literature; United States Intellectual life 19th century
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references at the end of each chapters and index.
• Nota di contenuto: 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.
• Sommario/riassunto: "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.