Misery's Mathematics: Mourning, Compensation, and Reality in Antebellum American LiteratureThis book reveals the strain of a moment in American cultural history that led several remarkable writers -- including Emerson, Warner, and Melville -- to render the stark rupture of loss in innovative ways. Pushing Protestant culture's sense of loss into secular terrain, these three key writers rejected Calvinist and sentimental models of bereavement, creating instead the compensations of a mature American literature whose 'originality' stemmed from its capacity to mourn the loss of a common culture and, through such mourning, to assent to new social and cultural realities. Balaam locates this appeal to 'reality' in the analogies antebellum writers drew between their experience of bereavement, and the experiences of uncertainty and disillusionment, that followed the revolutions in science, the winding down of creedal systems and the economic instability typifying the pre-Civil War era. |
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... at the foot of a massive erratic boulder lying in a mountain clearing, Bet climbs tothe summit and, waving herstaff aboveherhead, sings an impassioned stanza tothe wilderness: Tell them, I AM,” Jehovah said To Moses, while earth heard ...
... at the time, thereis“a dismal process going on in the grave,” but for Bryantdeathought to beapproached not under compulsionas “thequarryslave atnight, /Scourged to his dungeon” butin a state of “unfaltering trust” “sustained and soothed ...
... fond regrets and tenderrecollections” atthe grave makeshis approach to mourningseem a recipe fornot just poetic melancholiabut pathological, disordered mourning. By contrast, the harrowing experience of bereavement that exposes and ...
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Other editions - View all
Misery's Mathematics: Mourning, Compensation, and Reality in Antebellum ... Peter Balaam Limited preview - 2009 |
Misery's Mathematics: Mourning, Compensation, and Reality in Antebellum ... Peter Balaam No preview available - 2016 |
Misery's Mathematics: Mourning, Compensation, and Reality in Antebellum ... Peter Balaam No preview available - 2009 |