Discourses of mourning in Dante, Petrarch, and Proust / Jennifer Rushworth.

Author
Rushworth, Jennifer, 1987- [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Εdition
First edition.
Published/​Created
  • Oxford, United Kingdom ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2016.
  • ©2016
Description
201 pages : 1 illustration ; 24 cm.

Availability

Copies in the Library

Location Call Number Status Location Service Notes
Firestone Library - Stacks PN56.G69 R87 2016 Browse related items Request

    Details

    Subject(s)
    Series
    Oxford modern languages and literature monographs [More in this series]
    Summary note
    This book brings together, in a novel and exciting combination, three authors who have written movingly about mourning: two medieval Italian poets, Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarca, and one early twentieth-century French novelist, Marcel Proust. Each of these authors, through their respective narratives of bereavement, grapples with the challenge of how to write adequately about the deeply personal and painful experience of grief. In Jennifer Rushworth's analysis, discourses of mourning emerge as caught between the twin, conflicting demands of a comforting, readable, shared generality and a silent, solitary respect for the uniqueness of any and every experience of loss. Rushworth explores a variety of major questions in the book, including: what type of language is appropriate to mourning? What effect does mourning have on language? Why and how has the Orpheus myth been so influential on discourses of mourning across different time periods and languages? Might the form of mourning described in a text and the form of closure achieved by that same text be mutually formative and sustaining? In this way, discussion of the literary representation of mourning extends to embrace topics such as the medieval sin of acedia, the proper name, memory, literary epiphanies, the image of the book, and the concept of writing as promise In addition to the three primary authors, Rushworth draws extensively on the writings of Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes. These rich and diverse psychoanalytical and French theoretical traditions provide terminological nuance and frameworks for comparison, particularly in relation to the complex term melancholia. -- From publisher's website.
    Bibliographic references
    Includes bibliographical references (pages 163-194) and index.
    Language note
    English text with selections in Italian with parallel English translations, selections in French with parallel English translations, and selections in Latin with parallel English translations.
    Contents
    • Introduction : interpolating the medieval and the modern
    • Mourning and acedia in Dante
    • Petrarch's fraught poetics of melancholia
    • Proust's Recherche, Derridean 'demi-deuil', and mimetic mourning
    • Epilogue : in search of an ending.
    ISBN
    • 9780198790877 (hardback)
    • 0198790872 (hardback)
    LCCN
    2016939028
    OCLC
    950476068
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