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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... sense ofthings inways beyond easyacknowledgment. For innumerable hours ofcollaborative mourning work, Iam grateful to Carlton James. Will Balaamand Natalie Balaam fairly cheerfully excusedmefrom a great many breakfasts even while they ...
... sense of reality,orreveal a new one. Geertz reveals the interrelatedness of conceptionsof mortalityandcultural norms of bereavement and mourningforreligion inhis observation that “asareligious problem, theproblem of sufferingis ...
... sense of coherence that a compensatory blessing would sure bring: Yet I hope thissorrowis not to passover us withoutinsome way giving aspiritual blessing, even greater than the temporal blessing we have lost. Mr. Emerson is very ...
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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 |