English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century Laws in Mourning

"This book situates elegy's conventions within the rituals of rhetoric and mourning. Drawing on anthropology to analyse transitional rites, charismatic dying and the performance of grief, it offers new readings of famous poems, as well as little-known texts published in manuscript and popular print. It recontextualizes elegies commemorating heraldic funerals and public executions, to reveal how poets asserted their independence and unique status by manipulating the rituals designed to affirm consensus and the power of the state. Examining three famous executions of the 1640s, critical elegies for other poets, and poems mourning the death of children, Andrea Brady reveals the radical potentiality of the elegiac genre. This book provides new contexts for canonical elegies by Ben Jonson, John Donne, Henry King and John Milton, among others, and introduces a set of questions about the relationship between private experience and public morality, the body and creativity, and death and writing."--BOOK JACKET.

Andrea Brady teaches English literature at Brunel University, London, UK.

Introduction * The Ritual of Rhetoric * The Rhetoric of Grief * The Funerary Ritual * The Ritualised Execution * The Critical Elegy * The 'Private' Elegy * Index