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English poets from Jonson to Wordsworth used poetic epitaphs-poems inscribed or purporting to be inscribed upon tombs-to express their views concerning the p,ower and limitations of poetry as a response to human mortality. In the first major study of the English poetic epitaph, Joshua Scodel examines the genre's once vital role in the social construction of the dead, arguing that the poetic epitaph's changing representations of the deceased are inseparable from changing relations among the living. Drawing upon genre theory, social and cultural history, and anthropology, Scodel situates the development of the genre from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth century within the central conflicts of English collective life.He shows how such writers as Jonson, Donne, Carew, Crashaw, Herrick, Marvell, Cowley, Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Gray, and Wordsworth transform generic conventions in order to create their individual epitaphic poetics.Readers interested in English literary history, cultural poetics, comparative literature, the history of attitudes toward death, and the relationship between literature and the visual arts will find The English Poetic Epitaph fascinating reading Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- PART 1. BENJONSON AND THE EPITAPHIC TRADITION -- Chapter 1. Monumental Poetics: The Epitaph and the Tomb -- Chapter 2. Much in Little: The Poetics of Brevity -- Chapter 3. Mourning and Praise: The Elegy and Epitaph -- PART 2. CONFLICT AND COMMEMORATION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY EPITAPH -- Chapter 4. Reconceiving the Dead: Donne and Carew on Donne -- Chapter 5. Praising Honest Men: Social and Religious Tensions in the Early and Mid- Seventeenth-Century Epitaph -- Chapter 6. Herrick and the Epitaph of Retreat -- Chapter 7. The Politics of Nostalgia in the Late Seventeenth-Century Epitaph -- PART 3. NEW SUBJECTS, NEW READERS: THE EIGHTEENTH- AND EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY EPITAPH -- Chapter 8. "Your Distance Keep": Pope's Epitaphs upon Himself -- Chapter 9. Grafting Fame: Pope and the Dilemmas of Epitaphic Praise -- Chapter 10. "Kindred Spirits": The Proper Reader in the Mid-Eighteenth- to Early Nineteenth-Century Epitaph -- Chapter 11. Praising Honest Creatures: Paternalist Commemoration from the Mid Eighteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century -- Chapter 12. Wordsworth and the End of the Epitaphic Tradition -- Epilogue -- Index
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