Grief and Genre in American Literature, 1790-1870

Focusing on the role of genre in the formation of dominant conceptions of death and dying, Desirée Henderson examines literary texts and social spaces in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. Henderson's study shows that an author's use or rejection of the conventions of memorial literature speaks to their positions within debates about gender, national identity and citizenship, the consequences of slavery, the nature of democratic representation, and structures of authorship and literary authority.