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. |
From inside the book
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... losses as apermanent monument with which thesurvivor's selfhood couldbepartially identified. The “normal”forgetting associated with the work ofmourning ishere likenedtoaviolent“root[ing] out” ofsorrow from theheart.“No, the lovewhich ...
... loss as Crayonoffers could, like religious injunctions against grieving, makestrong negative feelings of anger and ambivalence feelings moredifficult toexpress. Negativefeelings denied, sublimatedorsuppressed inconfrontation withthisor ...
... loss andeach attempted to dojustice tothe complexity of bereavement.Though theirevident differences emergein their different responses, they eachgained powerfortheir literary visions through their rejection of the norms of sentimental ...
... loss could be balanced. RichardForrer's description of thePuritan and rationalist “theodicies in conflict” in antebellum American literature drawson Clifford Geertz's theory of the essential function of a religion within culture ...
... loss “misery's mathematics” (Piazza Tales 157). Iwillhave more to say about Hunilla and especially about Tarnmoor'sperception ofher inchapter3, butMelville's phrase nicely conveys the main topicofthis book,the meanings fashioned by ...
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 |