Cover; Contents; List of Figures; Acknowledgements; Introduction: Re-reading Graveyard Poetry; 1 Prospects of Eternity: The Theology of Poetic Salvation; 2 The Problem of Religious Authority and Poetic Autonomy; 3 Seeking the Daimonic and the Divine; 4 The Paths of Glory: Death and Poetic Ambition; 5 In Trembling Hope: Reading and the Sympathetic Afterlife; Post-mortem; Bibliography; Index
In the first book-length study of this important poetic mode, Parisot suggests that graveyard poetry is closely connected to the mid-eighteenth-century aesthetic revision of poetics. Parisot reads poetry by Robert Blair, Edward Young and Thomas Gray as a series of poetic experiments that attempt to accommodate changing religious and reading practices and translate religious concerns about death and salvation into parallel reconsiderations of poetic authority, agency, death and afterlife