Elegiac adaptations : resisting the closure of mourning in Elizabeth Robinson's Three Novels

textElizabeth Robinson's Three Novels (2011) is a lyric re-exploration of three Victorian novels: Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868) and The Woman in White (1859-60), and George Gissing's Eve's Ransom (1895). Robinson ostensibly wrote the poems as an elegy for her father; however, Three Novels also unearths elegiac aspects of its source novels that have been previously unexamined by critics. Each of the Victorian source novels narrates a movement from an initial loss toward an eventual resolution, mirroring the traditional structure of an elegy: mourning is ultimately completed by the acceptance of a compensatory substitute for the loss. While the poetry in Three Novels emphasizes the presence of elegy in its sources, the poems themselves fracture the practice of normative mourning by rewriting these novels in the style of Jahan Ramazani's melancholic "anti-elegy" which forecloses the possibility of loss resolution. Because the loss is not neatly resolved, it becomes an object of focus. Reading the anti-elegy manifest in Three Novels creates a space to mourn the losses incurred by each novel, thereby recuperating the overlooked figures of the female, the landscape, and the self that had been diminished by the narrative's drive to resolution.Englis

'Eastern' Elegy and 'Western' Epic:reading 'orientalism' in Propertius 4 and Virgil's Aeneid

This article explores the extent to which the genres of epic and elegy can be considered ‘occidental’ and ‘oriental’ respectively. Such a polarity is apparently constructed in the ‘epic’ and ‘elegiac’ movements of Propertius 4.1, but it is also progressively deconstructed in Propertius’ reception of Virgil’s Aeneid in elegies 4.1, 4.6 and 4.9. On the one hand, Propertius reads the Aeneid for its oriental components (e.g. the Phrygian immigration as viewed by native Italy ; its oriental ‘heroines’ : Dido, Cleopatra and, if the episode to which she lends her name is not an interpolation, Helen). On the other hand, Propertian elegy has for its part become more occidental (Propertius sings of maxima Roma and the Roman victory at Actium ; Cynthia is dead). In this way, Propertius shows that the narrative of elegy is no less bound up with occidental hegemony than that of Virgilian epic, and that elegy’s literary exoticism is, like Virgil’s intertextual appropriation of Greek literature, itself contingent on Roman imperialism

LACANIAN UNCONSIOUS IN DYLAN THOMAS \"ELEGY\" AND \"IN MY CRAFT OR SULLEN ART\"

LACANIAN UNCONSIOUS IN DYLAN THOMAS \"ELEGY\" AND \"IN MY CRAFT OR SULLEN ART\" - Psychoanalysis, Unconscious, Dylan Thomas, Metaphor-Metonym

Elegy to My Eyes

This elegiac poem focuses on the speaker\u27s limited eyesight as she wakes up in the morning after letting her contacts dry up overnight

\u27By Winding Paths and Varied Slopes\u27: John Ruskin\u27s Non-fiction Prose and the Transformation of the Nineteenth Century Elegy

In this work I explore how the non-fiction prose of John Ruskin contributes to the transformation of the poetic genre of elegy in mid-late Victorian England. I argue that in this period, the elegy undergoes a shift so dramatic that its generic elements are no longer confined to poetry. I place and question the changes occurring in the Victorian elegy in part by my study of Peter Sacks\u27 seminal text The English Elegy (1985). In contextualizing my argument, I also consider more recent genre studies of the elegy by Stuart Curran, Erik Gray, Elizabeth Helsinger, Jahan Ramanzani, and Karen Weisman. The hybrid nature of Ruskin\u27s non-fiction prose embodies not only his debt to the genre of poetic elegy but his willingness to transform the elegy into an expression truly representative of the multiplicity of Victorian life. Jahan Ramanzani\u27s Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney claims that the “anti-elegy” is fully developed only in the twentieth century and ultimately argues that the “aggressive dislocations of elegiac codes” causing our own unease with consolation are unique to the modern elegy. What Ramanzani\u27s study fails to recognize is the complexity and multiplicity of forms present in the Victorian elegy before Thomas Hardy. The framework of my dissertation allows us to explore how John Ruskin\u27s understudied and under-theorized non-fiction prose operates as a field for the germination of hybrid forms and offers a new lens through which to understand Ruskin’s body of work

Beyond Consolation : Or Strangeness, Estrangement, and Strange-ing in the Elegy for the Black Body, 1955-Present

The Elegy for the Black Body examines the mid-twentieth to early-twenty-first-century poetic justice crafted by African American poets to eulogize individual African Americans whose deaths were the result of racial and political violence. In the age of lynching, mass shooting, and police brutality, I argue that an African American poetic tradition persists that, while not entirely beholden to the ancient elegy, is its distant relative, along with the English and American Elegy. I argue further that while the contemporary American elegy has undergone for the last six decades intensive study, from the notable studies done by Peter Sack’s in The English Elegy from Spencer to Yeats’s to Melissa Zeiger’s AIDS and Cancer study, few have canonized the African American elegiac tradition. This study leans on criticism of Jahan Ramazani, whose pioneering exploration of the variations and renovation found in a continuous string of poems by African American elegists provides a case for the elegy, not simply by African Americans, but elegies for the black body. The elegy for the black body micro-analyzes a selection of poems from 1955 to 2017, pulled from various styles and periods, but unified by theme and response to a racially violent narrative. So what constitutes the elegy for the black body? Is it what Jahan Ramazani calls the “lynching elegy” of Langston Hughes’ blues elegy? Is it the persisting protest aesthetic of the post-Hughes blues elegy, the anti-consolatory martyr poem of the Black Arts Movement? Is it entangled in the protest poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks and Audre Lorde, whose justice elegies embody a maternal literary tradition of mourning that resists racial and sexual hegemonic violence? Is it inclusive of communal bodies and spaces as in Sonia Sanchez’ communal elegy for the Philadelphia Osage Street bombing? Could it survive the 90’s apathy towards slain famous black bodies as seen in the fame elegy for Tupac Shakur, or does it resurface in the microaggressions of a post-racial Obama America as seen in the conceptual elegy of Claudia Rankine? Does it extend into the meta-elegies for Eric Garner and Michael Brown as exemplified by Ross Gay and Danez Smith? These and much more constitute the elegy for the black body. Beginning with the blues oral tradition, this text highlights an extractable period of literary poetic response to the murder of black bodies. A long list of poets, major and minor spanning over six decades of African American poetry, tacitly respond to the horrific and racially violent deaths of black individuals, including children. These poets include, but are not limited to Langston Hughes, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Haki R. Madhubuti, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Claudia Rankine, Ross Gay, and Danez Smith—who together construct a compelling form for what can be termed the elegy for the black body. While adhering to traditional formulations of the elegy as a poem that is occasioned by death, the elegy for the black body distinguishes itself from other species of the elegy by going beyond sentiment and towards dissent. While it embraces grief, it also subverts it. While it approaches consolation, it also converts it, using tools both familiar and ‘strange’ to investigate and interrogate society—ultimately inscribing black bodies into literary meaning

The Elegiac Puella as Virgin Martyr

This is a postprint (author's final draft) version of an article published in the journal Transactions of the American Philological Association in 2009. The final version of this article may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/apa.0.0023 (login may be required). The version made available in OpenBU was supplied by the author.This paper explores the ideological currents running through Maximianus's subversive revival of the genre of Augustan love elegy in the beleaguered Rome of the mid-sixth century. The third elegy narrates an apparent childhood reminiscence of the poet, a failed romance with a young girl, Aquilina. But it soon becomes clear that, in the character of Aquilina, Maximianus has deliberately blurred the literary archetypes of the elegiac puella and the virgin martyr from Christian hagiography. This bizarre configuration allows the elegist simultaneously to provoke questions about the representation of female figures in both genres. By likening the elegiac puella to the martyr, Maximianus highlights the latent violence of elegiac topoi. By likening the martyr to the elegiac puella, Maximianus highlights the eroticism that often has a prominent place in accounts of virgin martyrdom. Not merely a formal experiment or the product of Augustan nostalgia, Maximianus's elegies represent a real attempt to reinvent elegy's questioning stance in a new social and religious context