Communities of death : Whitman, Poe, and the American culture of mourning /

To twenty-first century readers, nineteenth-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 pro...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Bradford, Adam C. (Author)
Format: Book
Language:English
Published: Columbia : University of Missouri Press, [2014]
Subjects:
Table of Contents:
  • Ascendant harmonies : Whitman's "Art singing and heart singing" in Poe's Broadway journal of 1845
  • Inspiring death : Poe's poetic aesthetics and the "communities" of mourning
  • Horrifying (re)inscriptions : Poe's transcendent Gothic and the 'effects' of reading
  • The collaborative construction of a death-defying cryptext : Walt Whitman's Leaves of grass
  • Embodying the book : mourning for the masses in Walt Whitman's Drum-taps
  • Aggregating Americans : the political immortality of Walt Whitman's Two rivulets
  • Afterword(s) : curious conclusions.