Continuing Bonds with the Dead ：Parental Grief and Nineteenth-Century American Authors ( Amer Lit Realism & Naturalism )

Publication subTitle ：Parental Grief and Nineteenth-Century American Authors

Publication series ：Amer Lit Realism & Naturalism

Author： Harold K. Bush  

Publisher： University of Alabama Press‎

Publication year： 2016

E-ISBN: 9780817389543

P-ISBN(Paperback): 9780817319021

P-ISBN(Hardback):  9780817319021

Subject： I06 Literature, Literature Appreciation

Keyword： American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism., Death in literature., Bereavement in literature., Children -- Death., Parental grief., Authors, American -- Psychology., Death -- United States -- Psychological aspects -- History -- 19th century., Death -- Social aspects -- United States -- History -- 19th century.

Language： ENG

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Description

Harold K. Bushs Continuing Bonds with the Dead examines the profound transfiguration that the death of a child wrought on the literary work of nineteenth-century American writers. Taking as his subjects Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and W. E. B. Du Bois, Bush demonstrates how the death of a child became the defining before-and-after moment in their lives as adults and as artists. In narrating their struggles, Bush maps the intense field of creative energy induced by reverberating waves of parental grief and the larger nineteenth-century culture of mortality and grieving.
 
Bush explores in detail how each of these five writers grappled with and were altered by the loss of a child. He writes, for example, with moving insights about how the famed author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn found himself adrift on a river of grief when meningitis struck down his daughter, Susy. In his deeply learned exploration of Twains subsequent work, Bush illuminates how Twain wrote to cope with Susys death, to make sense of her persistent presence in his life, and possibly to redeem her loss. Passionate and personal, Bushs insightful prose traces the paths of personal transformation each of these emblematic American writers took in order to survive the spiritual trauma of loss.
 
The savage Civil War was Americas shared before and after moment, the pivot upon which the nations future swung. Bushs account of these five writers grief amplifies our understanding of Americas evolving, national relationship to mourning from then to the present.

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