 | American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman Subjects: Elegiac poetry American -- History and criticism; American poetry -- History and criticism; Mourning customs in literature; Grief in literature; Death in literature; 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. |
