Home and Domesticity in Contemporary Elegy

Domesticity is a significant context in contemporary elegy. Not only do many contemporary poets set their elegiac work within the domestic sphere, the house is drawn into the modes of grief and redress; the trend derives from a desire for individual and personal, rather than traditional and impersonal, rites of mourning. Using a broadly Freudian theoretical framework, this paper will consider the ways in which house and home serve an elegiac art. It isolates four principal uses or representations of the domestic. Domestic space and items might be positively regarded as the object of deflected desire; alternatively the home might accrue negative associations as a site of trauma. For some poets grief is understood in terms of "unhomeliness" as defined by Freud. Following on from debates regarding gender and elegy, this paper argues that for male poets elegising paternal figures, the domestic sphere facilitates a tender mode of address between mourner and mourned, whilst deconstructing notions of paternal authority

Aesthetics · Art · Context (archaeology · Elegiac · Elegy · Freudian slip · Grief · Literature · Object (grammar · Phallic stage · Poetry · Psychoanalysis · Redress · Sociology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Psychology · History · Philosophy

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