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The refusal to recognize kinship relations among slaves, interracial couples, and same-sex partners is steeped in historical and cultural taboos. In Kindred Specters', Christopher Peterson explores the ways in which non-normative relationships bear the stigma of death that American culture vehemently denies. Probing Derrida's notion of spectrality as well as Orlando Patterson's concept of "social death," Peterson examines how death, mourning, and violence condition all kinship relations. Through Charles Chesnutt's The' Conjure Woman', Peterson lays bare concepts of self-possession and dispossession, freedom and slavery. He reads Toni Morrison's Beloved' against theoretical and historical accounts of ethics, kinship, and violence in order to ask what it means to claim one's kin as property. Using William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!' he considers the political and ethical implications of comparing bans on miscegenation and gay marriage. Tracing the connections between kinship and mourning in American literature and culture, Peterson demonstrates how racial, sexual, and gender minorities often resist their social death by adopting patterns of affinity that are strikingly similar to those that govern normative relationships. He concludes that socially dead "others" can be reanimated only if we avow the mortality and mourning that lie at the root of all kinship relations. Christopher Peterson is visiting assistant professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College.

Death in literature. --- Kinship in literature. --- Mourning customs in literature.

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Grief in literature --- Mourning customs in literature --- Camus, Albert, --- Duras, Marguerite --- Criticism and interpretation.

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Russian poetry --- Belarusian poetry --- Ukrainian poetry --- Laments --- Death in literature. --- Mourning customs in literature. --- History and criticism. --- History and criticism

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Literary semiotics --- Thematology --- anno 1900-1999 --- Death in literature. --- Funeral rites and ceremonies in literature. --- Mortality in literature. --- Mourning customs in literature. --- Suicide in literature.

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Esther Schor tells us about the persistence of the dead, about why they still matter long after we emerge from grief and accept our loss. Mourning as a cultural phenomenon has become opaque to us in the twentieth century, Schor argues. This book is an effort to recover the culture of mourning that thrived in English society from the Enlightenment through the Romantic Age, and to recapture its meaning. Mourning appears here as the social diffusion of grief through sympathy, as a force that constitutes communities and helps us to conceptualize history. In the textual and social practices of the British Enlightenment and its early nineteenth-century heirs, Schor uncovers the ways in which mourning mediated between received ideas of virtue, both classical and Christian, and a burgeoning, property-based commercial society. The circulation of sympathies maps the means by which both valued things and values themselves are distributed within a culture. Delving into philosophy, politics, economics, and social history as well as literary texts, Schor traces a shift in the British discourse of mourning in the wake of the French Revolution: What begins as a way to effect a moral consensus in society turns into a means of conceiving and bringing forth history.

Death in literature --- English literature --- -Grief in literature --- Literature and history --- -Mourning customs --- -Mourning customs in literature --- -British literature --- Inklings (Group of writers) --- Nonsense Club (Group of writers) --- Order of the Fancy (Group of writers) --- Manners and customs --- Rites and ceremonies --- Funeral rites and ceremonies --- History and literature --- History and poetry --- Poetry and history --- History --- History and criticism --- -History --- -History and criticism --- Thematology --- anno 1800-1899 --- anno 1700-1799 --- Death in literature. --- Grief in literature. --- Mourning customs in literature. --- Mourning customs --- History and criticism. --- Grief in literature --- Mourning customs in literature