National Melancholy Mourning and Opportunity in Classic American Literature [Hardcover]

InNational Melancholy, Breitwieser offers close readings of important American writers (Anne Bradstreet, Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Sarah Orne Jewett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Jack Kerouac) who were struggling to understand mourning, both in their own experience and in the abstract. He draws attention to their inquiries into the way mourning gets blocked or diverted, especially into external social interferences with mourning designed to transform mournful emotions into feelings of solidarity with national causes, and into the depression that follows from such false mourning. Emphasizing their struggle to repossess mourning, he argues that for several of them reclaimed mourning opened a door onto a strange and fresh understanding of experience.Mitchell Breitwieser is Professor of English at the University of California-Berkeley. He is is the author ofCotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin: The Price of Representative Personalityand ofAmerican Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning: Religion, Grief and Ethnology in Mary White Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative. His current project is tentatively titledThe Life and Times of Harry Lime: Personal and Historical Disappointment in Graham Greene's The Third Man. Breitwieser has been working for almost two decades on the psycho-political tangle of representing loss, to which he brings an especially philosophical focal length and evocative way with language. National Melancholy is, above all things, a book meant to beread, not just an argument to be summarized and circulated. Thomas Ferraro, Duke UniversityBreitwieser's close readings reveal that the thwarting of mourning, partly linked to nationalist feeling, was a central issue for many American authors, but that those who successfully reclaimed mourning came to strange and fresh understandings of the actual world. According toNational Melancholy, American writers believe in what Michael Breitweiser conciselylSª