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Communities of death Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and the nineteenth-century American culture of mourning and memorializing
This dissertation examines the way the work of two nineteenth-century American authors, Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe, borrowed from, challenged, and even worked to support prevailing cultural attitudes, conventions, and ideas regarding death, mourning and memorializing as they produced their poems and tales, articulated their thoughts regarding the purpose and act of producing and reading literature, and designed their material book or magazine objects. Using both new historicist and book studies methodologies, it exposes how these writers drew upon literary, ritual, and material practices of this culture, and how, in turn, this culture provided an interpretive framework for understanding such work. In its initial three chapters, which focus largely on Edgar Allan Poe, this dissertation revisits Poe's aesthetic philosophies ("The Poetic Principle" and "The Philosophy of Composition"), much of his most notable Gothic work (such as "Annabel Lee" and "The Raven"), readers' responses to this work, and his own attempts or designs to mass-produce his personal script (in "A Chapter on Autography," "Anastatic Printing," and his cover for The Stylus) in order to revise our understanding of his relationship to this culture and its literary work, exposing a more sympathetic and less subversive relationship than is usually assumed.
- "This dissertation examines the way the work of two nineteenth-century American authors, Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe, borrowed from, challenged, and even worked to support prevailing cultural attitudes, conventions, and ideas regarding death, mourning and memorializing as they produced their poems and tales, articulated their thoughts regarding the purpose and act of producing and reading literature, and designed their material book or magazine objects. Using both new historicist and book studies methodologies, it exposes how these writers drew upon literary, ritual, and material practices of this culture, and how, in turn, this culture provided an interpretive framework for understanding such work. In its initial three chapters, which focus largely on Edgar Allan Poe, this dissertation revisits Poe's aesthetic philosophies ("The Poetic Principle" and "The Philosophy of Composition"), much of his most notable Gothic work (such as "Annabel Lee" and "The Raven"), readers' responses to this work, and his own attempts or designs to mass-produce his personal script (in "A Chapter on Autography," "Anastatic Printing," and his cover for The Stylus) in order to revise our understanding of his relationship to this culture and its literary work, exposing a more sympathetic and less subversive relationship than is usually assumed."@en
- "Criticism, interpretation, etc"@en
- "Communities of death Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, and the nineteenth-century American culture of mourning and memorializing"@en