Overview
This anthology of graveyard poetry is designed to make available to students of English language literature this once popular but now rather obscure genre of eighteenth-century verse. It contains foundational graveyard poems, innovative and original variations, notable and frivolous imitations, and several odd and noteworthy transformations by British and American poets. This work is aimed at students of English and American literature. It brings together in one volume, for the first time, some of the most popular and nfluential religious and spiritually contemplative poems of the mid-eighteenth century, as well as notable and original imitations and adaptations. The anthology illustrates that the genre of graveyard poetry was a transatlantic phenomenon that lasted well into the nineteenth century, to which both popular and serious poets - even a poet laureate - contributed. The diverse selection of poems emphasizes the genre's religious roots, but equally shows how the later eighteenth-century fashion for sentimental melancholy, aesthetic development in Romanticism, and the popular gothic craze helped transform and prolong the genre's popular appeal.
Full Product Details
Author: Evert Jan van Leeuwen
Publisher: The Edwin Mellen Press Ltd
Imprint: Edwin Mellen Press Ltd
ISBN: 9780773442658
ISBN 10: 0773442650
Pages: 340
Publication Date: July 2014
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
This anthology invites us to re-examine the centrality of death in the period's literary culture, not only as a source of religious contemplation and advice, but also as a powerfully rich metaphor which will continue to resonate with new readers. (Dr. Penny Pritchard, Senior Lecturer in English Literature University of Hertfordshire) ...this anthology does what the very best anthologies do: it surprises you with the unfamiliar, unsettles your notions of the texts that have come to seem old acquaintances, and it shakes up our sense of the poetry of the period. (Dr Michael Newton, Department of English, University of Leiden)
"""This anthology invites us to re-examine the centrality of death in the period's literary culture, not only as a source of religious contemplation and advice, but also as a powerfully rich metaphor which will continue to resonate with new readers."" (Dr. Penny Pritchard, Senior Lecturer in English Literature University of Hertfordshire) ""...this anthology does what the very best anthologies do: it surprises you with the unfamiliar, unsettles your notions of the texts that have come to seem old acquaintances, and it shakes up our sense of the poetry of the period."" (Dr Michael Newton, Department of English, University of Leiden)"
Author Information
Dr. Evert Jan van Leeuwen received his PhD (cum laude) from Leiden University, the Netherlands. He is currently a lecturer in English and American literature and culture at Leiden University, and specializes in the relations between forms of belief and the creative imagination in English-language horror and supernatural culture in both classic literature and popular fiction.
