Description
Book SynopsisIn
Dying Modern, renowned literary critic Diana Fuss argues that as death has been increasingly shunted off-stage, out of the public eye, poets have taken up the task of reckoning with dying, loss, absence, and grief.
Trade Review“[Fuss] approaches variations on the form of elegy with such complexity and acumen, and provides much insight into the complexities of our relation to death and the enigma of our simultaneous proximity and avoidance. These are things, after all, about which it can be almost impossible to talk.” -- Diana Arterian * Los Angeles Review of Books *
“[An] elegant meditation. . . . Even Fuss admits that she is surprised that ‘her little book on elegy . . . [which] I thought was about dyig quietly evolved into a book about surviving. It is a pleasure to be surprised alongside her.” -- Sally Connolly * TLS *
“This book is an erudite, beautifully written study of them. If you’re a lover of Emily Dickinson’s work or that of Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, or Richard Wilbur, you will want to read this book. If you teach literary criticism or simply love poetry, you will want to read Fuss’s book. Superb book.” -- Hope Leman * Critical Margins *
“In a luminous, beautifully considered study of the modern elegy, Fuss (Princeton) demonstrates the ways that poets have creatively imagined modes of talking about the dead...Highly recommended.” -- D. A. Henningfeld * Choice *
“[Fuss] argues persuasively for the continued value of the consolatory elegy and examines “the ethical dimentions of the modern elegy.”... [A] concise, insightful, meditative book.” -- Barbara Kelly * Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin *
"An exceptionally lively, often glitteringly witty essay on the vagaries, contents, and discontents of nineteenth- and twentieth-century elegy, a genrewhose fate, in England and America, has been radically disrupted and even, sometimes, deformed by the cultural fate of modern death itself." -- Sandra Gilbert * Literature and Medicine *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Dying . . . Words 9
poetry 10
consolation 12
defiance 20
banality 24
newness 31
lastness 35
2. Reviving . . . Corpses 44
comic 46
religious 50
political 57
historical 61
literary 67
poetic 73
3. Surviving . . . Lovers 78
loving 82
waiting 86
leaving 90
refusing 95
existing 98
surviving 102
Conclusion 107
Notes 113
Bibliography 131
Index 141
Copyright Acknowledgments 149
