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29 Taylor, E. (c. 1685). Huswifery. In: The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor, (ed. T.J.Johnson), 116. Princeton: Princeton UP. 1939, this ed. 1966. JSTOR.
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31 Wheatley, P. (1770). On the Death of the Rev. MR. GEORGE WHITEFIELD. Literature in Context, [online], Available at https://anthology.lib.virginia.edu/work/wheatley/wheatley-death-whitefield. (accessed 28 June 2021).
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SECONDARY WORKS
1 Bercovitch, S. (1975). The Puritan Origins of the American Self, 2011 edition. New Haven and London: Yale UP.
2 Blauner, R. (1966). Death and social structure. In: Death and Identity: Revised Edition (ed. R.Fulton), 35–59. Bowie, MD: Charles Press. 1976. Reprinted from: Psychiatry 29 (November 1966), pp. 378–394.
3 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2018). History of 1918 Flu Pandemic. CDC, [online], Available at https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-commemoration/1918-pandemic-history.htm. (accessed 11 June 2021).
4 Douglas, A. (1975). Heaven our home. In: Death in America, (ed. D.E. Stannard), 49–68. U of Pennsylvania Press.
5 Farrell, J.J. (1980). Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830-1920. Philadelphia: Temple UP. HathiTrust.
6 Fletcher, K. (2018) Race and the funeral procession: What Jessica Mitford missed. TalkDeath, [online], Available at https://www.talkdeath.com/race-funeral-profession-what-jessica-mitford-missed/#:~:text=what%20jessica%20mitford%20missed%20what%20mitford%20missed%20was,as%20a%20need%20for%20caring%20for%20black%20bodies. (accessed 4 June 2021).
7 French, S. (1975). The cemetery as cultural institution: The establishment of Mount Auburn and the “Rural Cemetery” movement. In: Death in America, (ed. D.E.Stannard), 69–91. U of Pennsylvania Press.
8 Hobsbawm, E. (1994). The Age of Extremes. New York: Vintage. 1996.
9 Holloway, K. (2002). Passed On: African American Mourning Stories. Durham and London: Duke UP.
10 Lifton, R.J. (1973). The sense of immortality: On death and the continuity of life. In: Death and Identity: Revised Edition, (ed. R.Fulton), 19–35. Bowie, MD: Charles Press. 1976. Reprinted from: American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 33 (1973).
11 Martin, W. (1984). An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press.
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15 Mitford, J. (1963). The American Way of Death. New York: Simon and Schuster.
16 Outka, E. (2020). Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature. New York: Columbia UP.
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23 Warner, L. (1959). The city of the dead. In: Death and Identity: Revised Edition, (ed. R. Fulton), 363–381. Bowie, MD: Charles Press. 1976. From: The Living and Dead, (L.Warner), ch 9 (Yale UP).
7
Artificers of the World: Transcendentalism and Its Poetic Legacies
Bruce RondaColorado State University
By the mid-1840s, in one of several reinventions of his career, former transcendentalist Orestes Brownson had turned to Roman Catholicism and proceeded to launch bitter diatribes against his one-time colleagues. For them, he charged, “the individual is the authority before which all must bow…their leading doctrine is, that each man may and should be a Christ.” Ultimately, Brownson concluded, the entire Protestant movement “ends in Transcendentalism,” and “Transcendentalism is the last stage this side of nowhere; and when reached, we must hold up, or fly off into boundless vacuity” (Brownson 1966, 6: p. 134).
Although some transcendentalists doubtless blanched at Brownson’s harsh words, they may also have admitted their truth. The coterie, labeled “transcendentalists” mostly by their enemies, embraced no uniform political or social ideology and no one aesthetic approach. Many of the transcendentalists shared an admiration for Ralph Waldo Emerson, especially in the years when he was a controversial lecturer and essayist. But for nearly all of them, the charge that Brownson leveled stuck, for it was their religious radicalism that most consistently defined transcendentalism in its historical phase, the three decades before the outbreak of the Civil War.
Religious radicalism would have a huge impact on the way transcendentalists used language and wrote poetry, the particular focus here. There is, certainly, no identifiable “transcendentalist”