From the famous deathbed scene of Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Little Eva" to Mark Twain's parodically morbid poetess Emmeline Grangerford, a preoccupation with human finitude informs the texture of nineteenth-century US writing. This collection traces the vicissitudes of this cultural preoccupation with the subject of death and examines how mortality served paradoxically as a site on which identity and subjectivity were productively rethought. Contributors from North America and the United Kingdom, representing the fields of literature, theatre history, and American studies, analyze the sexual, social, and epistemological boundaries implicit in nineteenth-century America's obsession with death, while also seeking to give a voice to the strategies by which these boundaries were interrogated and displaced. Topics include race- and gender-based investigations into the textual representation of death, imaginative constructions and re-constructions of social practice with regard to loss and memorialisation, and literary re-conceptualisations of death forced by personal and national trauma.
Author(s): Frank
Year: 2007
Language: English
Pages: 250
Contents......Page 6
List of Illustrations......Page 8
Notes on Contributors......Page 9
Acknowledgements......Page 12
Introduction: Curious Dreams: Representations of Death in Nineteenth-Century US Writing and Culture......Page 14
Part 1 Death, Citizenship and the Politics of Mourning......Page 26
1 Chief Seattle’s Afterlife: Mourning and Cross-Cultural Synthesis In Nineteenth-Century America......Page 28
2 Escaping the ‘benumbing influence of a present embodied death’: The Politics of Mourning in 1850s African-American Writing......Page 42
3 Representative Mournfulness: Nation and Race in the Time of Lincoln......Page 56
4 ‘Stock in dead folk’: The Value of Black Mortality in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn......Page 74
5 ‘I cannot bear to be hurted any more’: Suicide as Dialectical Ideological Sign in Nineteenth-Century American Realism......Page 90
6 Rewriting the Myth of Black Mortality: W.E.B. Du Bois and Charles W. Chesnutt......Page 102
Part 2 Signatures and Elegies......Page 120
7 ‘I think I was enchanted’: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Haunting of American Women Poets......Page 122
8 God’s Will, Not Mine: Child Death as a Theodicean Problem in Poetry by Nineteenth-Century American Women......Page 138
9 ‘The little coffin’: Anthologies, Conventions and Dead Children......Page 154
Part 3 Cultures of Death......Page 168
10 The Fashion of Mourning......Page 170
11 ‘At a distance from the scene of the atrocity’: Death and Detachment in Poe’s ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’......Page 186
12 Spectres on the New York Stage: The (Pepper’s) Ghost Craze of 1863......Page 202
13 Medusa’s Blinding Art: Mesmerism and Female Artistic Agency In Louisa May Alcott’s ‘A Pair of Eyes; or, Modern Magic’......Page 218
14 “To surprise immortality”: Spiritualism and Shakerism in William Dean Howells’s The Undiscovered Country......Page 230
C......Page 244
L......Page 245
S......Page 246
Z......Page 247
