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Book Cover
Book
Author Spargo, R. Clifton

Title The ethics of mourning : grief and responsibility in elegiac literature / R. Clifton Spargo
Published Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004

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Location Call no. Vol. Availability
 WATERFT  809.9354 S7362/E  AVAILABLE
Description x, 314 pages ; 24 cm
Contents Toward an ethics of mourning -- Mourning and substitution in Hamlet -- Lyrical economy and the question of alterity -- The ethical rhetoric of anti-elegy -- Wishful reciprocity in Thomas Hardy's Poems of 1912-13 -- The bad conscience of American holocaust elegy : the example of Randall Jarrell -- The holocaust she walks in : Sylvia Plath and the demise of lyrical selfhood
Summary "Beginning from a reevaluation of famously inconsolable mourners ranging from Niobe to Hamlet, R. Clifton Spargo discerns the tendency of all grief to depend at least temporarily upon the refusal of consolation. By disrupting the traditional social and psychological functions of grief, the resistant mourner transforms mourning into a profoundly ethical act. Spargo finds such examples of ethical mourning in opposition to socially acceptable expressions of grief throughout the English and American elegiac tradition. Drawing on the work of Paul Ricoeur, Bernard Williams, and Emmanuel Levinas, his book explores the ethical dimensions of anti-consolatory grief through astute readings of a wide range of texts - including Hamlet and works by Milton and Renaissance elegists; more recent poetry by Dickinson, Shelley, and Hardy; and American Holocaust elegies by Sylvia Plath and Randall Jarrell."--Jacket
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Subject English literature -- History and criticism
Mourning customs in literature
Judaism and literature -- English-speaking countries
Elegiac poetry, American -- History and criticism
Elegiac poetry, English -- History and criticism
American literature -- History and criticism
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature
Loss (Psychology) in literature
Ethics in literature
Grief in literature
Death in literature
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
LC no. 2004000150
ISBN 0801879779 (hardcover ; alk. paper)
9780801879777 (hardcover ; alk. paper)