ENGLISH

Misery's Mathematics : Mourning, Compensation, and Reality in Antebellum American Literature

By Peter Balaam

Book information

Publisher
Taylor & Francis Group
Year
2009
ISBN
9780203504000, 9780415968072
LCC
PS217.G75 -- B36 2009eb
Language
english
Format
EPUB
Filesize
1 MB (1211985 bytes)
Series
Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory Ser.
Edition
1
Pages
201\0
Time added
2023-08-07 05:13:16
-- 1803-1882 -- Criticism and interpretation. ; Wa-- 1819-1885. -- Wide-- 1819-1891. -- Piazza tales. ; American literatuEmersonHermanRalph WaldoSusanwide world. ; Melville

Description

This book reveals the strain of a moment in American cultural history that led several remarkable writers -- including Emerson, Warner, and Melville -- to render the stark rupture of loss in innovative ways. Pushing Protestant culture's sense of loss into secular terrain, these three key writers rejected Calvinist and sentimental models of bereavement, creating instead the compensations of a mature American literature whose 'originality' stemmed from its capacity to mourn the loss of a common culture and, through such mourning, to assent to new social and cultural realities. Balaam locates this appeal to 'reality' in the analogies antebellum writers drew between their experience of bereavement, and the experiences of uncertainty and disillusionment, that followed the revolutions in science, the winding down of creedal systems and the economic instability typifying the pre-Civil War era.

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