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| Communities of Death
ISBN: 9780826273161
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / University of Missouri Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: American poetry; Memorialization; Death in literature.; Mourning customs in literature.;
To 21st century readers, 19th century depictions of death look macabre if not maudlin--the mourning portraits and quilts, the postmortem daguerreotypes, and the memorial jewelry now hopelessly, if not morbidly, distressing. Yet this sentimental culture of mourning and memorializing provided opportunities to the bereaved to assert deeply held beliefs, forge social connections, and advocate for social and political change. This culture also permeated the literature of the day, especially the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman. In Communities of Death , Adam C. Bradford explores the ways in which the ideas, rituals, and practices of mourning were central to the work of both authors. While both Poe and Whitman were heavily influenced by the mourning culture of their time, their use of it differed. Poe focused on the tendency of mourners to cling to anything that could remind them of their lost loved ones; Whitman focused not on the mourner but on the soul's immortality, positing an inevitable reunion. Yet Whitman repeatedly testified that Poe's Gothic and macabre literature played a central role in spurring him to produce the transcendent Leaves of Grass . By unveiling a heretofore marginalized literary relationship between Poe and Whitman, Bradford rewrites our understanding of these authors and suggests a more intimate relationship among sentimentalism, romanticism, and transcendentalism than has previously been recognized. Bradford's insights into the culture and lives of Poe and Whitman will change readers' understanding of both literary icons.
Adam C. Bradford is Assistant Professor of English and Associate Chair of the English Department at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida. He teaches Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture and is especially interested in the material and print culture of the period. His articles have been published in Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, Edgar Allan Poe Review, and Sentimentalism in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary and Cultural Practices . He lives in Plantation, Florida. |
