Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

2009 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-160
Author(s):  
Ann Schofield
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Nineteenth Century America

Here Is My Name When I Am Dead

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel McBride Lindsey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Focused Attention ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Modes Of Representation

This chapter explores death and mourning pictures within a shifting memorial culture that was rooted in historical modes of representation and theologies of redemption. Over the course of the nineteenth century, photographic portraiture emerged within this memorial culture as both the preferred iconography of mourning in nineteenth-century America and, significantly, as a relic of the departed that disclosed future glory to the bereaved. In this chapter, I explore the role of photographs as relics that illuminated the communion of shadows by mediating the body of the deceased with the grieving body of the bereaved. Here, photographs were devised not as tokens of the moldering body of the deceased but of promise of celestial reunion in glory. As memorial portraiture focused attention on the body of the deceased, another facet within the communion of shadows purported to provide evidence of the soul’s survival after death.

Telegraphies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kay Yandell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
The Body ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Write Form ◽  
The Many ◽  
American Authors ◽  
Sarah Winnemucca ◽  
Range Free

Telegraphies: Indigeneity, Identity, and Nation in America’s Nineteenth-Century Virtual Realm explores literatures envisioning the literary, societal, even the perceived metaphysical effects of various cultures’ telecommunications technologies, to argue that nineteenth-century Americans tested in the virtual realm new theories of self, place, and nation for potential enactment in the embodied world. Telegraphies opens with the literatures of such Native telecommunications technologies as smoke signals and sign language chains, to reconceive common notions of telecommunications technologies as synonymous with capitalist industrialization, and to analyze the cultural interactions and literary productions that arose as Native telegraphs worked with and against European American telecommunications systems across nineteenth-century America. Into this conversation the book integrates visions of Morse’s electromagnetic telegraph, with its claims to speak new, coded words and send bodiless, textless prose instantly across the continent. To the many and various telegraphies this book considers, American authors often reacted with a mixture of wonder, hope, and fear. Writers as diverse as Sarah Winnemucca, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, and Emily Dickinson, among others, craft poetic odes, memoirs, and novels that envision how the birth of perceived-instantaneous communication across a vast continent forever alters the way Americans speak, write, form community, and conceive of the divine. While some celebrate far-speaking technologies as conduits of a metaphysical manifest destiny to overspread America’s primitive cultures, others reveal how telecommunication empowers the previously silenced voice to range free in the disembodied virtual realm, even as the body remains confined by race, class, gender, disability, age, or geography.

Portraying the Dead

1989 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Ruby
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Place Of Death ◽  
Post Mortem ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The Dead ◽  
As If ◽  
Mourning Process

This article explores the custom of post-mortem photography. In nineteenth century America, this was a socially acceptable, publicly acknowledged form of photography. Professional photographers accepted commissions, advertised the service, and held professional discussions in their journals about the practice. The images were publicly displayed in wall frames and albums. Initially, death pictures were portraits which attempted to deny death by displaying the body as if asleep, or even conscious. By the turn-of-the-century, the deceased were displayed in a casket with an increasing emphasis upon the funeral. Today, families make their own photos; circulating them in a private manner so that many people assume that the custom has been abandoned. Counselors working with the parents of children who have died provide evidence that these images can be useful in the mourning process. The findings of this study suggest that a more thorough examination of the place of death-related photographs in the management of grief would be of value.

scholarly journals GEORGE HENRY FOX'S Photographic illustrations of skin diseases and the clinical photograph in late nineteenth-century America

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine E. A. Watson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Skin Diseases ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Power Relationships ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Clinical Photograph ◽  
The Aesthetic

George Henry Fox was a New York physician and author in the late nineteenth century. His interest in collecting photographs of notable dermatological cases led to the publication of several photographically illustrated dermatology texts between 1879 and the early twentieth century. This thesis focuses on the fIrst and second editions of Fox's Photographic Illustrations of Skin Diseases, published in 1879 and 1885, respectively. The hand-coloured Artotype plates from these two editions are analyzed and contrasted in terms of the influence of studio portraiture, issues of patient anonymity and consent, and the aesthetic changes between editions. The power relationships and scientifIc classifIcation involved in depicting the body on ftlm are also considered. The books are on textualized with discussions of nineteenth-century American medical history, the use of clinical photographs as illustrations, photomechanical processes, late nineteenth-century dermatology texts, and Fox's biography.

scholarly journals GEORGE HENRY FOX'S Photographic illustrations of skin diseases and the clinical photograph in late nineteenth-century America

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine E. A. Watson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Skin Diseases ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Power Relationships ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Clinical Photograph ◽  
The Aesthetic

George Henry Fox was a New York physician and author in the late nineteenth century. His interest in collecting photographs of notable dermatological cases led to the publication of several photographically illustrated dermatology texts between 1879 and the early twentieth century. This thesis focuses on the fIrst and second editions of Fox's Photographic Illustrations of Skin Diseases, published in 1879 and 1885, respectively. The hand-coloured Artotype plates from these two editions are analyzed and contrasted in terms of the influence of studio portraiture, issues of patient anonymity and consent, and the aesthetic changes between editions. The power relationships and scientifIc classifIcation involved in depicting the body on ftlm are also considered. The books are on textualized with discussions of nineteenth-century American medical history, the use of clinical photographs as illustrations, photomechanical processes, late nineteenth-century dermatology texts, and Fox's biography.

Context and Meaning: Roman Catholic Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America

1985 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 482-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Taves
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Holy Water ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Church ◽  
As If

A French visitor to a nineteenth-century Irish Catholic parish in the United States described the scene as follows: Behold them, when the sanctuary bell announces the moment of consecration; they raise their hands, they extend their arms in the form of a cross, they pray and sigh aloud; at times some leave their pew and prostrate themselves in the aisle, in order to assume a more suppliant and adoring attitude. … If you wait until the end of mass, you will be further edified. You will see them approach as near as possible to the high altar, before which they bow profoundly, making several genuflections, and frequently remain for a moment almost prostrate to the ground. From here they go to kneel at the altar of the Blessed Virgin, then before that of St. Joseph. Then follows a last and touching station before the body of the dead Christ which the Italians call the pietá; they pray here for a few moments, and respectfully press their lips to the five wounds of the Saviour. At the door of the church they take holy water, sign themselves with it repeatedly, and sprinkle their faces with it; then turning to the tabernacle they make a last genuflection, as if to bid farewell to our Lord, and finally withdraw.

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