Contemporary Elegy in World Literature

Adele Bardazzi, DPhil (Oxon) is Assistant Professor in Italian Studies at the University of Utrecht and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. Her research delves into issues of form and interpretation, poetry and poetics, lyric theory, gender and women’s studies. Among her past and forthcoming publications are: Eugenio Montale: A Poetics of Mourning (2022); Elegy Today: Resistance, Revision, Re-Mapping (2023); Weaving Media in Modern and Contemporary Italian Poetry (2023);Conglomerates: Andrea Zanzotto’s Poetic Clusters; Textile Poetics of Entanglement (Brill); and The Poetics of Fabric. She is founder of the Weaving Media Network, and co-founder of Italian Poetry Today and Non solo muse.Roberto Binetti, DPhil (Oxon), is Research Fellow at the University of Padua, working on a project on nuclear anxiety in 20th-century lyric poetry. His research focuses on modern and contemporary poetry, with an emphasis on the relationship between the lyric and cultural history. Among his past and forthcoming publications are: Elegy Today. Resistance, Revision, Re-Mapping (2023); Poetics of Becoming: Women’s Poetry in Italy’s Long Seventies; Conglomerates: Andrea Zanzotto’s Poetic Clusters; La domanda dell’inconscio: Lingua e vita interiore nella poesia di Amelia Rosselli e Andrea Zanzotto; and Anne Carson: letteratura liquida. He is co-founder of Italian Poetry Today and Non solo muse.Jonathan Culler is Class of 1916 Professor Emeritus of English at Cornell University. His research is in the fields of structuralism,literary theory and literary criticism. He is the author of Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature(1975) and Theory of the Lyric (2015).

"Is there more to elegy than consolation or its refusal? The essays that animate this exciting and timely collection invite us to think beyond the familiar binary of elegy and anti-elegy, revealing the many other types of labor mourning poems assume in our increasingly global world: embodiments of social justice, expressions of international solidarity, vehicles of democratization, exercises in shared empathy. An important and field-changing book." - Diana Fuss, Louis W. Fairchild Class of ’24 Professor of English, Princeton University. "Situated at the threshold of life and death, the elegy maintains a universal pertinence across cultures. Its histories in many ways represent the histories of humanity. This volume offers invaluable insights into the history of the contemporary elegy in its diverse forms of expression. Its broad-ranging essays leave no doubt that there does indeed exist an ‘elegiac solidarity’ (Jahan Ramazani) among the manifold of elegiac genres in contemporary world literature."- Robert Harrison, Emeritus Rosina-Pierotti Professor of Italian Literature, Stanford University.

• Notes on ContributorsIntroduction: Contemporary Entangled ElegyAdele Bardazzi, Roberto Binetti, and Jonathan CullerPart1 Resistance1 The Elegiac TransnationalChinese Poetry, Sutured Absence, World LiteratureNick Admussen2 Impossible ElegiesResisting the PaternalAdele Bardazzi3 Mourning Nature: The Elegiac Mode and the Not Yet LostRe-reading Juliana Spahr’s “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache”Francesco Giusti4 Elegiac Subjunctive, or Secular Variations on Posthumous PersonhoodDavid ShermanPart2 Revision5 Shamanic Chant and Contemporary Korean ElegyKim Hyesoon’s “Autobiography of Death”Ivanna Sang Een Yi6 Self-Elegy and the Making of Lyric CommunitiesRoberto Binetti7 Durs Grünbein’s Elegy for DresdenKaren Leeder8 Rec(h)ording ElegyTransformative Mourning in the Poetry of Cecilia VicuñaRachel Elizabeth RobinsonPart3 Re-mapping9 The Poetics of PainLament and Elegy in Modern Greek LiteratureGail Holst-Warhaft10 Mourning WomenTwo Modern Takes on Arabic ElegyEmily Drumsta11 Death as a Natural Presence and as a MonsterThe Elegy in African Textual Traditions with a Focus on Swahili Verbal ArtRoberto Gaudioso12 Resisting AnnihilationThe AIDS Anthology Poem and Collective MelancholiaBrandon Menke13 A Global Web of ElegiesJahan RamazaniIndex