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Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America
Contributor(s): Luciano, Dana (Author)
ISBN: 0814752233     ISBN-13: 9780814752234
Publisher: New York University Press
OUR PRICE:   $30.40  
Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats
Published: November 2007
Qty:
Annotation: "

Lucianos Arranging Grief is a tour de force of literary-historical scholarship, blending close reading and a broad grasp of nineteenth century American culture to produce a truly illuminating account of what Luciano calls that cultures attachment to attachment. Tracking the manifold uses to which grief was put in the period, from the most public to the most interior, Luciano makes it possible for the reader to understand the way that grief shapes bodies by shaping time. Arranging Grief will be indispensable reading for scholars of emotion, sexuality, temporality, and the history of national imaginaries.
-- Christopher Nealon, author of "Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion Before Stonewall"

Tracing the proliferation of forms of mourning and memorial across a century increasingly concerned with their historical and temporal significance, Arranging Grief offers a much-needed new view of the aesthetic, social, and political implications of emotion.

Considering a diversity of texts, including mourning manuals, sermons, memorial tracts, poetry, and fiction by writers such as 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, Dana Luciano illustrates the ways that grief coupled the feeling body to time.

Nineteenth-century appeals to grief, as Luciano demonstrates, proliferated modes of sacred time across both religious and ostensibly secular frameworks, at once authorizing and unsettling established forms of connection to the past and the future. Drawing on formalist, Foucauldian and psychoanalyticcriticism, Arranging Grief shows that literary engagements with grief offered ways of challenging deep-seated cultural assumptions about history, progress, bodies, and behaviors."
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | American - General
Dewey: 810.935
LCCN: 2007018424
Series: Sexual Cultures
Physical Information: 0.91" H x 5.98" W x 9.09" (1.06 lbs) 345 pages
Themes:
- Topical - Death/Dying
- Chronological Period - 19th Century
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:

2008 Winner, MLA First Book Prize
Charting the proliferation of forms of mourning and memorial across a century increasingly concerned with their historical and temporal significance, Arranging Grief offers 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 Grief shows how literary engagements with grief put forth ways of challenging deep-seated cultural assumptions about history, progress, bodies, and behaviors.

Contributor Bio(s): Luciano, Dana: - Dana Luciano is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University. She is the author of Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America.