Includes bibliographical references (pages 295-333) and index.
CONTENTS NOTE
Text of Note
Introduction: leaving poetry behind -- Legacy and revision in eighteenth-century Anglo-American elegy -- Elegy and the subject of national mourning -- Taking care of the dead: custodianship and opposition in antebellum elegy -- Elegy's child: Waldo Emerson and the price of generation -- Mourning of the disprized: African Americans and elegy from Wheatley to Lincoln -- Retrievements out of the night: Whitman and the future of elegy.
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SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
American Elegy reconnects the study of early American poetry to the broadest currents of literary and cultural criticism. Max Cavitch begins by considering eighteenth-century elegists such as Franklin and Bradstreet. He then turns to elegy's adaptations during the Jacksonian age. Devoting unprecedented attention to the early African-American elegy, Cavitch sees in the poems the development of an African-American genealogical imagination.