Arranging Grief

by Luciano, Dana

• ISBN13: 9780814752227
• ISBN10: 0814752225
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-11-01
• Publisher: New York Univ Pr

Summary

2008 Winner, MLA First Book PrizeCharting the proliferation of forms of mourning and memorial across a century increasingly concerned with their historical and temporal significance,Arranging Griefoffers an innovative new view of the aesthetic, social, and political implications of emotion. Dana Luciano argues that the cultural plotting of grief provides a distinctive insight into the nineteenth-century American temporal imaginary, since grief both underwrote the social arrangements that supported the nation's standard chronologies and sponsored other ways of advancing history.Nineteenth-century appeals to grief, as Luciano demonstrates, diffused modes of "sacred time" across both religious and ostensibly secular frameworks, at once authorizing and unsettling established schemes of connection to the past and the future. Examining mourning manuals, sermons, memorial tracts, poetry, and fiction by Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Apess, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Warner, Harriet E. Wilson, Herman Melville, Frances E. W. Harper, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Keckley, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Luciano illustrates the ways that grief coupled the affective body to time. Drawing on formalist, Foucauldian, and psychoanalytic criticism,Arranging Griefshows how literary engagements with grief put forth ways of challenging deep-seated cultural assumptions about history, progress, bodies, and behaviors.

Author Biography

Dana Luciano is an assistant professor teaching sexuality and gender studies and nineteenth-century American literature in the English department at Georgetown University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction: Tracking the Tear	p. 1
Moments More Concentrated than Hours: Grief and the Textures of Time	p. 25
Evocations: The Romance of Indian Lament	p. 69
Securing Time: Maternal Melancholia and Sentimental Domesticity	p. 119
Slavery's Ruins and the Countermonumental Impulse	p. 169
Representative Mournfulness: Nation and Race in the Time of Lincoln	p. 215
Coda: Everyday Grief	p. 261
Notes	p. 269
Selected Bibliography	p. 321
Index	p. 339
About the Author	p. 345
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