National Melancholy: Mourning and Opportunity in Classic American Literature

Mitchell Breitwieser

Published by Stanford University Press 2007

National Melancholy

Mourning and Opportunity in Classic American Literature

Mitchell Breitwieser

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503626416

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

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Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
1. Introduction: The Time of the Double Not Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. Early American Antigone: Anne Bradstreet Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	57
3. Thomas Jefferson’s Prospect Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	84
4. Who Speaks (and Who Writes) in Walt Whitman’s Poems? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	122
5. Henry David Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	144
6. Losing Deephaven: Sarah Orne Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	160
7. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, and the Puzzle of Inherited Mourning Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	247
8. Jazz Fractures: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Epochal Representation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	263
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	281
Works Cited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	305
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	317

Language: English
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Audience: College/higher education;
Pages
- Main content: 336

eBook

Published: September 4, 2007
ISBN: 9781503626416