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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... and Terrorism from Victorian Fiction totheModern Novel Adrian S.Wisnicki City/Stage/Globe Performance and Space inShakespeare's London D.J. Hopkins Transatlantic Engagements with the British Eighteenth Century Pamela J. Albert.
Mourning, Compensation, and Reality in Antebellum American Literature Peter Balaam. Transatlantic Engagements with the British Eighteenth Century Pamela J. Albert Race, Immigration, and American Identity in the Fiction of SalmanRushdie ...
... the debts I've incurred in the process writing it. This study took initial form as a dissertation under the direction of Will Howarth and Arnold Rampersad, whose acumen and ... to William Cain for his belief in A c k n o w l e d g ...
Mourning, Compensation, and Reality in Antebellum American Literature Peter Balaam. imagery from George Blair's Graveyard School poem “The Grave” helped him to present the changes in cosmology of ... To mix for ever with the elements, To be ...
Mourning, Compensation, and Reality in Antebellum American Literature Peter Balaam. To mix for ever with the elements, To be a brother to th' insensible rock. And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain Turns with his share and treads ...
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 |