Cambridge.University.Press.The.American.Puritan.Elegy.A.Literary.and.Cultural.Study.Jun.2000.
This page intentionally left blank T H E A M E R I C A N P U R I TA N E L E G Y 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 Read in the framework of their own time and place, the elegies shed new light on the emotional dimension of Puritanism and the important role of ritual in Puritan culture Hammond’s book reassesses a body of poems whose importance in their own time has been obscured by almost total neglect in ours It represents the first full-length study of its kind in English is Professor of English at St Mary’s College of Maryland He is author of Sinful Self, Saintly Self: The Puritan Experience of Poetry () and Edward Taylor: Fifty Years of Scholarship and Criticism () Editor Ross Posnock, University of Washington Founding editor Albert Gelpi, Stanford University Advisory board Nina Baym, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University Ronald Bush, St John’s College, Oxford University Albert Gelpi, Stanford University Myra Jehlen, Rutgers University Carolyn Porter, University of California, Berkeley Robert Stepto, Yale University Recent books in the series Writing America Black: Race Rhetoric and the Public Sphere Imagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, and the New World of American Literature, – Blacks and Jews in Literary Dialogue Edward S Curtis and the North American Indian, Inc Afrocentrism, Antimodernism, and Utopia Blackness and Value: Seeing Double Mark Twain and the Novel: The Double-Cross of Authority Dos Passos and the Ideology of the Feminine Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture Freeing the Soul: Race, Subjectivity, and Difference in Slave Narratives Sublime Enjoyment: On the Perverse Motive in American Literature THE AMERICAN PURITAN ELEGY A Literary and Cultural Study JEFFREY A HAMMOND The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Jeffrey A Hammond 2004 First published in printed format 2000 ISBN 0-511-03374-5 eBook (Adobe Reader) ISBN 0-521-66245-1 hardback For my parents Jeanne Weldon Hammond and Evan Ronald Hammond