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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... other colleagues —especially Mike Kowalewski, Tim Raylor, andKofiOwusu—gave advice Ionlywish Ihad been better able to take.I'm also grateful for the encouragement and expertise ofDavid Robinson, Laura Dassow Walls, Elizabeth Schultz ...
... other more social processes, theyalso became potentindicators of “Christian piety,social benevolence, and sincere sensibility” (124). Garry Willsobserves thatAbraham Lincoln's melancholy was noted inthe1850s as anattractive quality ...
... other words, thespiritual entity released fromthe flesh toascend is notthesoul of the dead but the affective lifeof the bereaved: a “trulyspiritual affection rises purified fromevery sensual desire,and returns, like aholy flame, to ...
... other similarly persuasive cultural “maps”for grieving experience would be preserved and expressed in other ways. In his study oftherole of mourning in Melville's major prose works, NeilL.Tolchin observesthat: a doublebind characterized ...
... , personalloss,worldly defeat, or the helplesscontemplation of others' agonysomething bearable, supportable—something,as we say,sufferable” (104). The phrase “misery's mathematics” is borrowed from Melville's picturesque traveler.
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 |