The American Puritan elegy
Subtitle: a literary and cultural study
By: Jeffrey A. Hammond.
Series: Cambridge studies in American literature and culture
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2000
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 264
Subjects: Elegiac poetry, American -- History and criticism.; American poetry -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775 -- History and criticism.; American poetry -- Puritan authors -- History and criticism.; American poetry -- New England -- History and criticism.; Literature and anthropology -- New England -- History.; Christianity and literature -- New England -- History.; Puritans -- New England -- Intellectual life.; Death in literature.; Grief in literature.
Description: "Jeffrey Hammond's study takes an anthropological approach to the most popular form of poetry in early New England - the funeral elegy. Hammond reconstructs the historical, theological and cultural contexts of these poems to demonstrate how they responded to a specific process of mourning defined by Puritan views on death and grief.

The elegies emerge, he argues, not as "poems" to be read and appreciated in a postromantic sense, but as performative scripts that consoled readers by shaping their experience of loss in accordance with theological expectation."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 240-255) and index.