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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... expression of a shift in dispensation in the Protestant cultures of the nineteenthcentury New England away from the doctrinal “law” of Calvinist orthodoxy to the“grace” ofa more democratized Romantic morality. In Bet's negotiation of it ...
... expression ofthese negative feelings. Instead, conflicts were driven underground, thus setting the scene for lifelong chronic grief, in which the mourner often performed a pathological identification with significant behavior of the ...
... expressions of his acute,prolonged and inplaces strangely disavowedgrief inessays, journals,letters, andanoted elegy have become a site of considerable interest in Emerson studies, with Barbara Packer, MarkEdmundson, Sharon Cameron ...
... expression ofher situation, Lidian positedthe existence ofa necessary balancein which “this sorrow” wouldbe the source ofa compensatory boon.However generally acceptable such a misery's mathematicsmay have been in Concordin the 1840s ...
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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 |