The Prose Elegy

by Vickery, John B.

• ISBN13: 9780807133927
• ISBN10: 0807133922
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780807135051
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-05-15
• Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr
• More Book Details

Table of Contents

Introduction: Major Elegiac Changes	p. 1
Elegies of Family and Love
Loss of the Ideal: James Agee's A Death in the Family	p. 11
Failure as a Loss: John Updike's The Centaur	p. 34
Generational Critiques: Virginia Woolf's The Years and William Faulkner's Sartoris	p. 41
Familial Disintegration: James Joyce's Dubliners and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited"	p. 58
The Loss of Romantic Love: Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room	p. 65
Marriage as Cultural Change: Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms	p. 85
Marriage as the End of Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night and John Updike's Too Far to Go	p. 106
Cultural and Philosophical Elegies
Modernism on Culture and History: William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, and Others	p. 129
Bifocal Time: Virginia Woolf's The Years and To the Lighthouse	p. 137
Perspectives on the Self: Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's, and Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays	p. 152
A Coda: Continuity and Innovation	p. 163
Notes	p. 169
Works Cited	p. 181
Index	p. 187
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Excerpts

The Prose Elegy considers the works of American and British fiction writers to reveal how the traditional English poetic elegy expanded and evolved to include prose and to deal not only with death but also with other forms of loss. Focusing on individual works ranging from Henry James to Joan Didion, the author explores both the forms the elegy takes throughout the twentieth century and the skeptical and uncertain attitudes of writers struggling to confront the trauma of loss. Vickery offers detailed interpretations of the elegiac components in the works of novelists James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Hemingway, each of whom forged a distinctive style, as well as the chroniclers of pervasive stoicism, such as Malcolm Lowry. Writers as nuanced as Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Agee, and Ford Madox Ford are also included. For these writers, Vickery reveals, sorrow intrudes upon the personal, intellectual, and cultural aspects of daily living. By examining how loss touches each of these aspects, their books probe intellectual boundaries and embrace new elegiac themes. Truman Capote and John Updike, for example, view memory-which can disappear quickly-as inherently sad. What consoles writers of the modern elegy changes, too. In place of Milton's religion or Shelley's philosophy, twentieth-century writers seek comfort from family, marriage, and ideas of the self.