...To contextualize current laments over the death of literature and to explore literary studies’ longstanding investment in mournful feelings and tales of loss, this chapter returns to the canon-making projects treated in earlier chapters and explores their emotional fall-out. Those projects...

...The first chapter explains how The Sopranos codified the black-market melodrama by twinning Soprano’s mafia and home life. The chapter also uses David Chase’s famous crime drama to examine two of the genre’s key antecedents: the Hollywood gangster film and, further back, the baroque mourning play...

...In this chapter, Desmond analyses contemporary US debates over publishing pet obituaries in newspapers. She suggests that these obituaries raise multiple issues about the “appropriate” objects of mourning, the “right” to mourn publicly, and the ways that such public mourning both legitimates social...

...This chapter focuses on the collective nature of ancien régime mourning as this was imagined in the choral laments and fictional onstage funerals in tragédies en musique. It begins by contextualizing public mourning practice in Paris under the Bourbons. State funerals were reserved for people...

...This chapter argues that the New Historicism is primarily a form of elegy. It explores the lossless assemblage universe—with the aid of Sigmund Freud's “Mourning and Melancholia”—two antithetical, contemporary understandings of that universe. The most basic task of the New Historicism as a work...

... in this book, are read as scenes of erotic pleasure and a certain kind of mourning now theorized as “neutral.” By attending to the textual and rhetorical spacing of Camera Lucida and other late writings, and to Barthes’ own thinking on the space of writing as peri-graphic, the author...

... that emphasizes their universality, exhibits featuring dead animal bodies invite genericization. The following sections of the book deal with known or individuated animals such as pets. Desmond analyzes animal burial and mourning practices, paying special attention to pet obituaries and pet cemeteries...

...The conclusion synthesizes the different functions of mourning and how its unfolding contributes to both individual and community well-being, making the aesthetic practice in and of itself a valuable activity. It suggests that an aesthetic reflection on grief has great purchase in a) understanding...

... model honeybees US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency animals animal studies taxidermy roadkill kniship animal mourning animal art On a warm June day in 2013, I stood in a Midwestern cattle barn gently sweeping fecal material out of the lower intestinal tract of a bull. My shoes were...

...This chapter looks at how the American mission introduced new ideas of death and mourning, while rejecting the indigenous culture’s understanding of the possible relationships that could exist between the dead and the living. For the Americans the dead could only serve as moral examples and nothing...

... status of the fetus, led to a codification of rules of management of fetal bodies and rise of specific rites of mourning for miscarried and aborted fetuses. Morgan Lynn photographs of fetuses ultrasound obstetrical amniocentesis genetic counseling midwives miscarriage Modell Bernadette Peters...

... of mourning that was animated by a desire for collectivity and self-determination. It theorizes black gay mourning as a political emotion that contests the erasure of AIDS from public discourse. black gay writers Blackheart Collective black lesbian feminist culture and politics Carl Fred Christopher...

...Eugene O'Neill believed that tragedy reflected primarily the desperation of desire unaware of which forces are driving it to self-destruction. O'Neill attempted to make America appreciate the meaning of tragedy. Mourning Becomes Electra was his greatest work of tragedy...

... mediums (painting for Woolf, photography for Barthes) to work through the grief unleashed by a mother’s death. Whereas Woolf renders the gradual completion of Lily Briscoe’s painting as an exemplary process of mourning, however, Barthes wrestles with photography as a melancholic medium that ensures...

.... Examining the mourning wrappers and black pages produced by sixteenth-century English printers to estrange the phenomenon of the page, it considers the fact that writing, as it is usually conceived, must be supported at or by a surface. It proposes, as an alternative thought, that writing is diffused...

... would do something for the world through his language and poetry. This type of elegiac address possibly finds it precursor in Milton’s “Lycidas.” Derrida’s The Work of Mourning (2001) also echoes this unheard address to the dead. In Derrida’s case, however, the elegies are replies...

... surrounding Charles' one-man rebellion. “Crazy Blues” is a song of cultural haunting and cultural mourning that ends with fantasized vengeance. Thus, it is projected an image of badwoman vengeance that offered those who consumed it a way of sustaining themselves in the face of harsh realities. Black Boy...

... leaping in parent solicitude weight death grief mourning sorrow Cameron Sharon father consolation hopelessness McCarthy Cormac faith mother death in Augustine remembrance adoration emptiness gift hope pregnancy resignation asynchrony Berry Wendell impossibility suffering...

...This chapter analyzes how, why and to what extent nationalism, antinationalism and transnationalism intersect in poetry of mourning. It examines how the elegy might help in developing a taxonomy of the various forms of literary transnationalism and discusses the intercultural microcommunities...