Representations of Death in Nineteenth-Century US Writing and Culture

Lucy Frank

Contents: Introduction: Curious dreams: representations of death in 19th-century US writing and culture, Lucy Frank. Part 1 Death, Citizenship and the Politics of Mourning: Chief Seattle's afterlife: mourning and cross-cultural synthesis in 19th-century America, John J. Kucich; Escaping the 'benumbing influence of a present embodied death': the politics of mourning in 1850s African-American writing, Jeffrey Steele; Representative mournfulness: nation and race in the time of Lincoln, Dana Luciano; 'Stock in dead folk': the value of black mortality in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Stephen Shapiro; 'I cannot bear to be hurted any more': suicide as dialectical ideological sign in 19th-century American realism, Kevin Grauke; Rewriting the myth of black mortality: W.E.B. Du Bois and Charles W. Chesnutt, Joanne van der Woude. Part 2 Signatures and Elegies: 'I think I was enchanted': Elizabeth Barrett Browning's haunting of American women poets, Alison Chapman; God's will, not mine: child death as a Theodicean problem in poetry by 19th-century American women, Paula Bernat Bennett; 'The little coffin': anthologies, conventions and dead children, Jessica F. Roberts. Part 3 Cultures of Death: The fashion of mourning, Ann Schofield; 'At a distance from the scene of the atrocity': death and detachment in Poe's 'The Mystery of Marie Rogêt', Elizabeth Carolyn Miller; Spectres on the New York stage: the (Pepper's) Ghost Craze of 1863, Dassia N. Posner; Medusa's blinding art: mesmerism and female artistic agency in Louisa May Alcott's 'A Pair of Eyes; Or, Modern Magic', Ann Heilmann; 'To surprise immortality': spiritualism and Shakerism in William Dean Howells's The Undiscovered Country, Kelly Richardson. Index.