Description
Book SynopsisBreitwieser's close readings reveal that the thwarting of mourning, partly linked to nationalist feeling, was a central issue for many American authors, but that those who successfully reclaimed mourning came to strange and fresh understandings of the actual world.
Trade Review"Breitwieser has been working for almost two decades on the psycho-political tangle of representing loss, to which he brings an especially philosophical focal length and evocative way with language. National Melancholy is, above all things, a book meant to be
read , not just an argument to be summarized and circulated." —Thomas Ferraro, Duke University
"According to
National Melancholy, American writers believe in what Michael Breitweiser concisely identifies as the "not-yet" rather than the "no-more." American literature is committed, that is, to imagining the nation as a state of "permanent futurity". Despite this devotion to the "not-yet," however, the "no-more," as Breitweiser's highly impressive and extraordinarily wide-ranging collection of essays amply demonstrates, is not so easily left behind." --
Novel"
National Melancholy is among the most important books on American literature of the last decade. Breitwieser makes an astonishing case that a thwarted mourning process has been a precipitant phenomenon in the production of a large number of classic American texts. The book itself constitutes a successful act of mourning through the discovery of a language with which to confess, unburden, and move forward." -- Jay Fleigelman * Stanford University *
Table of ContentsContents Preface x 1. Introduction: The Time of the Double Not 000 2. Early American Antigone: Anne Bradstreet 000 3. Thomas Jefferson's Prospect 000 4. Who Speaks (and Who Writes) in Walt Whitman's Poems? 000 5. Henry David Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod 000 6. Losing Deephaven: Sarah Orne Jewett, Regionalism, and the Art of Loss 000 7. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, and the Puzzle of Inherited Mourning 000 8. Jazz Fractures: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Epochal Representation 000 Notes 000 Works Cited 000 Index 000
