American elegy: the poetry of mourning from the Puritans to Whitman

Introduction: leaving poetry behind

Legacy and revision in eighteenth-century Anglo-American elegy

Elegy and the subject of national mourning

Taking care of the dead: custodianship and opposition in antebellum elegy

Elegy's child: Waldo Emerson and the price of generation

Mourning of the disprized: African Americans and elegy from Wheatley to Lincoln

Retrievements out of the night: Whitman and the future of elegy.