National Melancholy: Mourning and Opportunity in Classic American Literature; Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America; Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism; Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning, and American Affinity

This chapter explores death and mourning pictures within a shifting memorial culture that was rooted in historical modes of representation and theologies of redemption. Over the course of the nineteenth century, photographic portraiture emerged within this memorial culture as both the preferred iconography of mourning in nineteenth-century America and, significantly, as a relic of the departed that disclosed future glory to the bereaved. In this chapter, I explore the role of photographs as relics that illuminated the communion of shadows by mediating the body of the deceased with the grieving body of the bereaved. Here, photographs were devised not as tokens of the moldering body of the deceased but of promise of celestial reunion in glory. As memorial portraiture focused attention on the body of the deceased, another facet within the communion of shadows purported to provide evidence of the soul’s survival after death.

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Telegraphies

10.1093/oso/9780190901042.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Kay Yandell

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Emily Dickinson ◽

Frederick Douglass ◽

The Body ◽

Nineteenth Century America ◽

Write Form ◽

The Many ◽

American Authors ◽

Sarah Winnemucca ◽

Range Free

Telegraphies: Indigeneity, Identity, and Nation in America’s Nineteenth-Century Virtual Realm explores literatures envisioning the literary, societal, even the perceived metaphysical effects of various cultures’ telecommunications technologies, to argue that nineteenth-century Americans tested in the virtual realm new theories of self, place, and nation for potential enactment in the embodied world. Telegraphies opens with the literatures of such Native telecommunications technologies as smoke signals and sign language chains, to reconceive common notions of telecommunications technologies as synonymous with capitalist industrialization, and to analyze the cultural interactions and literary productions that arose as Native telegraphs worked with and against European American telecommunications systems across nineteenth-century America. Into this conversation the book integrates visions of Morse’s electromagnetic telegraph, with its claims to speak new, coded words and send bodiless, textless prose instantly across the continent. To the many and various telegraphies this book considers, American authors often reacted with a mixture of wonder, hope, and fear. Writers as diverse as Sarah Winnemucca, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, and Emily Dickinson, among others, craft poetic odes, memoirs, and novels that envision how the birth of perceived-instantaneous communication across a vast continent forever alters the way Americans speak, write, form community, and conceive of the divine. While some celebrate far-speaking technologies as conduits of a metaphysical manifest destiny to overspread America’s primitive cultures, others reveal how telecommunication empowers the previously silenced voice to range free in the disembodied virtual realm, even as the body remains confined by race, class, gender, disability, age, or geography.

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The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture / Literary Partnerships and the Marketplace: Writers and Mentors in Nineteenth-Century America / Words at Work in "Vanity Fair": Language Shifts in Crucial Times, 1914-1930 / Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space

American Literature ◽

10.1215/00029831-2395438 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 86 (1) ◽

pp. 186-189

Author(s):

M. P. Brown

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

American Literature ◽

Public Space ◽

Print Culture ◽

Nineteenth Century America ◽

Vanity Fair

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Michael C. Cohen , The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015, $55.00 cloth, $55.00 ebook). Pp. 296. isbn 978 0 8122 4708 4, 978 0 8122 9131 5. - Cody Marrs , Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015, $99.99). Pp. 206. isbn 978 1 1071 0983 4.

Journal of American Studies ◽

10.1017/s0021875817000573 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 51 (3) ◽

pp. 996-1000

Author(s):

KAREN KILCUP

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

New York ◽

Civil War ◽

American Literature ◽

University Of Pennsylvania ◽

Cambridge University ◽

Social Lives ◽

Nineteenth Century America ◽

Nineteenth Century American Literature ◽

The Social

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Portraying the Dead

OMEGA - Journal of Death and Dying ◽

10.2190/hl4a-6vd6-pv42-lrwf ◽

1989 ◽

Vol 19 (1) ◽

pp. 1-20 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Jay Ruby

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Turn Of The Century ◽

The Body ◽

Place Of Death ◽

Post Mortem ◽

Nineteenth Century America ◽

The Dead ◽

As If ◽

Mourning Process

This article explores the custom of post-mortem photography. In nineteenth century America, this was a socially acceptable, publicly acknowledged form of photography. Professional photographers accepted commissions, advertised the service, and held professional discussions in their journals about the practice. The images were publicly displayed in wall frames and albums. Initially, death pictures were portraits which attempted to deny death by displaying the body as if asleep, or even conscious. By the turn-of-the-century, the deceased were displayed in a casket with an increasing emphasis upon the funeral. Today, families make their own photos; circulating them in a private manner so that many people assume that the custom has been abandoned. Counselors working with the parents of children who have died provide evidence that these images can be useful in the mourning process. The findings of this study suggest that a more thorough examination of the place of death-related photographs in the management of grief would be of value.

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