English Elegy

Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats
Erscheinungsjahr 1987
ISBN: 978-0-8018-3471-4
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 392 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 641 g

Winner of the Christian Gauss Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society

Peter Sacks explores the functions as well as the forms of convention in a book that is both an interpretive study of a genre and a series of close readings of individual poems. Moving from Spenser's "Astrophel" of 1595 to Yeats's "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory" of 1918, Sacks examines such elegiac motifs and conventions as the use of pastoral contexts, the employment of repetition and refrains, sudden outbursts of vengeful anger, and assertions of deflected sexual power. These and other elements of the elegy, he argues, are more than mere features of a conventionalized aesthetic design, they emerge as elements in the performance of the task of mourning.

Now available in paperback, The English Elegy is an ambitious and humane book, an eloquent work that counters the tendency of much recent criticism to lose the connection between literary language and the needs from which that language arises.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sacks, Peter M.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Interpreting the Genre: The Elegy and the Work of Mourning
Chapter 2. Spenser: The Shepheardes Calender and "Astrophel"
Chapter 3. Where Words Prevail Not: Grief, Revenge, and Language in Kyd and Shakespeare
Chapter 4. Milton: "Lycidas"
Chapter 5. Jonson, Dryden, and Grey
Chapter 6. Shelley: "Adonais"
Chapter 7. Tennyson: In Memoriam
Chapter 8. Swinburne: "Ave Atque Vale"
Chapter 9. Hardy: "A Singer Asleep" and Poems of 1912-13
Chapter 10. Yeats: "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory"
Epilogue: The English Elegy after Years, a Note on the American Elegy
Notex
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Sacks, Peter M.
Peter M. Sacks is an associate professor in the Writing Seminars and the Department of English at the Johns Hopkins University. He is also the author of In These Mountains, a book of poetry.