A Potent Spell

A Potent Spell

Author: Janna Malamud Smith

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2004-06-08

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 9780618446735

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Every parent has felt that certain dread: your toddler gets lost in the mall; your teenager isn't home by curfew; your third-grader walks to school alone. The psychotherapist Janna Malamud Smith rigorously argues that fear of child loss has the keenest effect on mothers and has proven to be a powerfuly underrated motivation for them throughout history. Bearing the brunt of responsibility for keeping children safe and healthy, mothers constantly accommodate to the need to be vigilant. Their fears make them vulnerable in many ways, affecting their daily lives in the workplace, at home, and within the social hierarchy. Smith takes the long view of this phenomenon, uncovering a buried message to mothers in advice books from the days of the Puritans to the present, in medicine and psychology, in art and literature. It is a history brimming with mothers' stories from ancient times to today. Like Arlie Hochschild's The Second Shift and Ann Crittenden's The Price of Motherhood, A Potent Spell confirms women's real experience of motherhood in America.


Facing Grief

Facing Grief

Author: John Flavel

Publisher:

Published: 2022-01-25

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 9781800402157

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In 1674, two years after his second wife's death, John Flavel published A Token for Mourners. In it he meditates on the words of Luke 7:13: 'And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her, and said unto her, 'Weep not.' From this verse the author helps the reader to think about grief, distinguishing 'moderate' sorrow from 'immoderate'. He spells out what is appropriate for a Christian mourner and what is not. This book is full of Scripture, counsel, warning, and wisdom gained from prayerful reflection on the personal experience of affliction in loss and grief. A best-seller for more than 150 years in both Britain and America, this little book gave much comfort to generations of Christian parents who suffered the heart-breaking experience of the loss of children. Now republished as Facing Grief: Counsel for Mourners, this attractive new edition makes Flavel's Token accessible once again in the form in which it knew such popularity - a small book, just the right size for carrying, and reading slowly, with meditation, reflection and prayer.


Grief and Genre in American Literature, 1790-1870

Grief and Genre in American Literature, 1790-1870

Author: Desirée Henderson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1317124480

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Focusing on the role of genre in the formation of dominant conceptions of death and dying, Desirée Henderson examines literary texts and social spaces devoted to death and mourning in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. Henderson shows how William Hill Brown, Susanna Rowson, and Hannah Webster borrowed from and challenged funeral sermon conventions in their novelistic portrayals of the deaths of fallen women; contrasts the eulogies for George Washington with William Apess's "Eulogy for King Philip" to expose conflicts between national ideology and indigenous history; examines Frederick Douglass's use of the slave cemetery to represent the costs of slavery for African American families; suggests that the ideas about democracy materialized in Civil War cemeteries and monuments influenced Walt Whitman's war elegies; and offers new contexts for analyzing Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar and Emily Dickinson's poetry as works that explore the consequences of female writers claiming authority over the mourning process. Informed by extensive archival research, Henderson's study eloquently speaks to the ways in which authors adopted, revised, or rejected the conventions of memorial literature, choices that disclose their location within decisive debates about appropriate gender roles and sexual practices, national identity and citizenship, the consequences of slavery, the nature of democratic representation, and structures of authorship and literary authority.