The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy. Edited by Karen Weisman.

Abstract

Critical interest in the elegy has adopted a newly urgent tone in the 21st century. Once suspected to be an outmoded and redundant genre by critics writing at the end of the previous century, elegy has resurfaced as a way into many current preoccupations within literary studies, not least the relationship between religion and literature. A return to questions of form and prosody, coupled with a renewed interest in questions of emotion, notably grief, bereavement and mourning, signals the elegy as a way into addressing ideas otherwise difficult to articulate and explore. Elegy has thus come to mean ‘elegiac’ for many critics, a word that covers a variety of forms and discourses—inclusive of the ‘prose elegy’—in addition to its primary sense as a poem of lament or funeral song. Weisman’s Handbook, then, comes at an opportune time and its very structure—divided into 23 essays on the ‘History’ of the elegy, and a further 15 under the header ‘Knowledge, Theme, and Practice’—registers this by offering a volume that reflects on, explores and challenges the diversity of ways in which elegy is understood and perceived. Beginning with an essay on ‘Ancient Greek Elegy’ (Gregory Nagy) and ending with an essay ‘On Photographic Elegy’ (Josh Ellenbogen), this excellent volume consciously locates itself as offering the reader an overview of elegy, while also identifying its key emotional and material shifts