RT Review
T1 The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy. Edited by Karen Weisman
JF Literature and theology
VO 27
IS 1
SP 123
OP 126
A1 Mason, Emma
LA English
PB Oxford University Press
YR 2013
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1780314272
AB Critical interest in the elegy has adopted a newly urgent tone in the 21st century. Once suspected to be an outmoded and redundant genre by critics writing at the end of the previous century, elegy has resurfaced as a way into many current preoccupations within literary studies, not least the relationship between religion and literature. A return to questions of form and prosody, coupled with a renewed interest in questions of emotion, notably grief, bereavement and mourning, signals the elegy as a way into addressing ideas otherwise difficult to articulate and explore. Elegy has thus come to mean ‘elegiac’ for many critics, a word that covers a variety of forms and discourses—inclusive of the ‘prose elegy’—in addition to its primary sense as a poem of lament or funeral song.
K1 Rezension
DO 10.1093/litthe/frs009