Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria

Esther Schor

Published by Princeton University Press 1995

Bearing the Dead

The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria

Esther Schor

In the series Literature in History

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400821488

Overview
Contents

About this book

Esther Schor tells us about the persistence of the dead, about why they still matter long after we emerge from grief and accept our loss. Mourning as a cultural phenomenon has become opaque to us in the twentieth century, Schor argues. This book is an effort to recover the culture of mourning that thrived in English society from the Enlightenment through the Romantic Age, and to recapture its meaning. Mourning appears here as the social diffusion of grief through sympathy, as a force that constitutes communities and helps us to conceptualize history.

In the textual and social practices of the British Enlightenment and its early nineteenth-century heirs, Schor uncovers the ways in which mourning mediated between received ideas of virtue, both classical and Christian, and a burgeoning, property-based commercial society. The circulation of sympathies maps the means by which both valued things and values themselves are distributed within a culture. Delving into philosophy, politics, economics, and social history as well as literary texts, Schor traces a shift in the British discourse of mourning in the wake of the French Revolution: What begins as a way to effect a moral consensus in society turns into a means of conceiving and bringing forth history.

Author / Editor information

Esther Schor is Associate Professor of English and John E. Annan Bicentennial Preceptor at Princeton University.

Reviews

Bearing the Dead ranges freely between texts often considered to belong to separate discourses. . . . Today we are on bad terms with our dead. The texts Schor addresses, as well as her discussion of them, resonate with possible lines of thought that need to be explored.---Rosemary Hill, The Guardian

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
INTRODUCTION Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	3
PART I: A CENTURY OF TEARS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	17
PART II: AUTHENTIC EPITAPHS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	115
EPILOGUE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	230
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	241
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	281

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