Misery's Mathematics - Mourning, Compensation, and Reality in Antebellum American Literature (Paperback)

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.

General

Imprint:	Routledge
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Series:	Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
Release date:	July 2016
First published:	2009
Authors:	Peter Balaam
Dimensions:	229 x 152mm (L x W)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	186
ISBN-13:	978-1-138-98124-9
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 19th century
LSN:	1-138-98124-9
Barcode:	9781138981249

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