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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... religious pastand into a new religion of feeling and its morality based insympathy. 2 Though initially reluctant to meet Bet inthe woods at aspot known as “Lucy'sgrave,” Janesoftens as she listens tothe madwoman's account ofthe ...
... religion and human duty. Theymay preach lessons to whichnone may refuse tolisten andwhichallthat livemusthear. Truths maybe there feltandtaught, in thesilence of ourown meditations, more persuasiveand more enduring than ever flowed ...
... religious injunctions against grieving, makestrong negative feelings of anger and ambivalence feelings moredifficult toexpress. Negativefeelings denied, sublimatedorsuppressed inconfrontation withthisor other similarly persuasive ...
... religious sentiment as a response to mortality's blows. Though the deathpoetry of Emmeline Grangerford earns the naïve admiration of HuckFinn, her bathetic verses and lugubriousdevotion todeathas a poetic topic seemtosatirize ...
... religious cosmologies andthe provenance of psychological modelsnow current. In apost Enlightenment but prepsychoanalytic era ... religion within culture—tosynthesize ageneral modelof reality—or “world view”—with asetof normsfor ethical ...
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 |