National melancholy : mourning and opportunity in classic American literature
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
National melancholy : mourning and opportunity in classic American literature
Stanford University Press, 2007
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [305]-316) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In National Melancholy, Breitwieser offers close readings of important American writers (Anne Bradstreet, Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Sarah Orne Jewett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Jack Kerouac) who were struggling to understand mourning, both in their own experience and in the abstract. He draws attention to their inquiries into the way mourning gets blocked or diverted, especially into external social interferences with mourning designed to transform mournful emotions into feelings of solidarity with national causes, and into the depression that follows from such false mourning. Emphasizing their struggle to repossess mourning, he argues that for several of them reclaimed mourning opened a door onto a strange and fresh understanding of experience.
Table of Contents
Contents Preface x 1. Introduction: The Time of the Double Not 000 2. Early American Antigone: Anne Bradstreet 000 3. Thomas Jefferson's Prospect 000 4. Who Speaks (and Who Writes) in Walt Whitman's Poems? 000 5. Henry David Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod 000 6. Losing Deephaven: Sarah Orne Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss 000 7. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, and the Puzzle of Inherited Mourning 000 8. Jazz Fractures: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Epochal Representation 000 Notes 000 Works Cited 000 Index 000
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