David Gordon studies the changing conception of one's own death by examining the work of some of the most important poets of the last two centuries. The turn from Enlightenment to Romanticism introduced a new conception of individual death that we would now call existential. As the power of religion waned and with it the consoling belief in an afterlife, writers--especially poets--began to think of death as nothingness, as void.Gordon identifies and analyzes in depth three major modes of literary response to this shifting sensibility that developed in successive waves during the nineteenth...
David Gordon studies the changing conception of one's own death by examining the work of some of the most important poets of the last two centuries. T...
