English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth

Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1991. 1st edition. Hardcover. Fine cloth copy in an equally fine dust-wrapper, now mylar-sleeved. Particularly well-preserved overall; tight, bright, clean and strong. Physical description; viii, 425 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm. Notes; Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents; pt. 1. Ben Jonson and the epitaphic tradition. Monumental poetics : the epitaph and the toom -- Much in little : the poetics of brevity -- Mourning and praise : the elegy and epitaph -- pt. 2. Conflict and commemoration in the seventeenth-century epitaph. Reconceiving the dead : Donne and Carew on Donne -- Praising honest men : spocial and religious tensions in the early and mid-seventeenth-century epitaph -- Herrick and the epitaph of retreat -- The politics of nostalgia in the late seventeenth century epitaph -- pt. 3. New subjects, new readers : the eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century epitaph. ""Your distance keep"" : Pope's epitaphs upon himself -- Grafting frame : Pope and the dilemmas of epitaphic praise -- ""Kindred spirits"" : the proper reader in the mid-eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century epitaph -- Praising honest creatures : paternalist commemoration from the mid eighteenth to the early nineteenth century -- Wordsworth and the end of the epitaphic tradition. Subjects; English poetry History and criticism. Epitaphs Great Britain History and criticism. Laudatory poetry, English History and criticism. Funeral rites and ceremonies in literature. Literature and society Great Britain. Praise in literature. Death in literature. English poetry. Epitaphs. Laudatory poetry, English.