American elegy: Legacy and revision in the poetry of mourning from the Puritans to Whitman

Elegy has an unbroken history in America from the early years of English settlement, yet beyond its Puritan phase it has received no comprehensive treatment. My dissertation examines the rich untapped archive of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American elegy, exploring the relation between the conventions of a genre vitally interested in continuity and the local pressures that force the recognition of their inadequacy to American modes of political succession, inheritance, paternalism, and cultural allegiance. Against the peremptory view that elegy becomes a defunct genre with the decline of Puritanism after 1700, I contend that this breakdown in formal and thematic coherence lays the ground for elegy's revitalization. The point at which the perceived coherence of a unitary generic tradition unravels is where the story of American elegy begins to gather new kinds of interest. Examples of failed nostalgia for Puritan modes prompt elegists to rethink the relation between mourning, poetry, and cultural vigilance. Mid-atlantic and southern elegies increasingly reflect distinct styles and eschatalogies. Manuscript networks create new contexts for mourning and sociability. Women write and publish elegies prolifically. The casualties of America's imperial history assume increasing prominence in the literary language of loss. And the British empire in American itself begins a process of dissolution that helps to shape eighteenth-century elegiac practice. From Mather to Whitman, the enhanced discontinuities of democratization and republican culture require ongoing rethinking of the adherence to generic norms, and the commitment to innovation in response to the idea and the fact of death. In poems at once distinctly occasional and fundamentally concerned with eternal regard, American elegists respond to the cultural accelerations and derangements of modernity by adapting the genre's traditional figurations of heritage and descent. I argue that they exploit elegy's reflexiveness in order to challenge genealogical renderings of literary history and the social world.