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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... nature's authority, thestory of ruin and rebirth told in its visual forms. Leaving Jane at the foot of a massive erratic boulder lying in a mountain clearing, Bet climbs tothe summit and, waving herstaff aboveherhead, sings an ...
... natural rather thanareligious phenomenon, and,for the survivors, an occasionnotof judgment but ofdivine, natural,andhuman sympathy.4Thisshift is further expressed inthis particularscene as Betsets moral authorityinmotion awayfromJane's ...
... nature (Irving 869; W.Bryantll.78–80). As KarenHalttunen has shown, the shift in focusfrom thedead to the mourner began in the nineteenth century to take deathas the “occasionfor two of the deepest 'right feelings' in human experience ...
... nature it is to revoke loved “temporal” objects and replace them with “spiritual” substitutes is striking. Lidian pays the costs of the reassurances sheclaims for herself through this religiousaccounting in Waldo'sdemotion froma ...
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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 |