Oxford Handbook of the Elegy

Mourning and memorialization are at the very centre of literary culture. They take on forms deeply resonant of the sundry traditions of poetic elegy even when those elegiac conventions are displaced concealed or plainly unintentional. For all of its pervasiveness however the elegy remains remarkably ill-defined: sometimes used as a catch-all to denominate texts of a somber or pessimistic tone sometimes as a marker for textual monumentalizing and sometimes strictly as a sign of a lament for the dead. This Handbook is the single most comprehensive study of its subject. It provides both a historical survey and a thematic engagement with the relevant issues in elegy. It is responsive to a pressing need for clarification of the relevant issues and to the exciting developments currently under way in elegy studies.