Book contents
- Death and the American South
- Series page
- Death and the American South
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Introduction: Death and the American South
- 1 Mutilated Bodies, Living Specters: Scalpings and Beheadings in the Early South
- 2 The Usable Death: Evangelicals, Anglicans, and the Politics of Dying in the Late-Colonial Lowcountry
- 3 When “History Becomes Fable Instead of Fact”: The Deaths and Resurrections of Virginia’s Leading Revolutionaries
- 4 American Mourning: Catastrophe, Public Grief, and the Making of Civic Identity in the Early National South
- 5 To Claim One’s Own: Death and the Body in the Daily Politics of Antebellum Slavery
- 6 Nativists and Strangers: Yellow Fever and Immigrant Mortality in Antebellum Charleston, South Carolina
- 7 “Cumberer of the Earth”: Suffering and Suicide among the Faithful in the Civil War South
- 8 The “Translation” of Lundy Harris: Interpreting Death out of the Confusion of Sexuality, Violence, and Religion in the New South
- 9 “He’s Only Away”: Condolence Literature and the Emergence of a Modern South
- 10 “A Monument to Judge Lynch”: Racial Violence, Symbolic Death, and Black Resistance in Jim Crow Mississippi
- 11 Reframing the Indian Dead: Removal-Era Cherokee Graves and the Changing Landscape of Southern Memory
- Index
9 - “He’s Only Away”: Condolence Literature and the Emergence of a Modern South
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2014
Book contents
- Death and the American South
- Series page
- Death and the American South
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Introduction: Death and the American South
- 1 Mutilated Bodies, Living Specters: Scalpings and Beheadings in the Early South
- 2 The Usable Death: Evangelicals, Anglicans, and the Politics of Dying in the Late-Colonial Lowcountry
- 3 When “History Becomes Fable Instead of Fact”: The Deaths and Resurrections of Virginia’s Leading Revolutionaries
- 4 American Mourning: Catastrophe, Public Grief, and the Making of Civic Identity in the Early National South
- 5 To Claim One’s Own: Death and the Body in the Daily Politics of Antebellum Slavery
- 6 Nativists and Strangers: Yellow Fever and Immigrant Mortality in Antebellum Charleston, South Carolina
- 7 “Cumberer of the Earth”: Suffering and Suicide among the Faithful in the Civil War South
- 8 The “Translation” of Lundy Harris: Interpreting Death out of the Confusion of Sexuality, Violence, and Religion in the New South
- 9 “He’s Only Away”: Condolence Literature and the Emergence of a Modern South
- 10 “A Monument to Judge Lynch”: Racial Violence, Symbolic Death, and Black Resistance in Jim Crow Mississippi
- 11 Reframing the Indian Dead: Removal-Era Cherokee Graves and the Changing Landscape of Southern Memory
- Index
Summary
In the early twentieth century, condolence notes, brief letters restricted solely to consolation, were a relatively new death ritual and a new genre of writing in its own right that became a central feature of "modern" southern death care: the burial of the dead, the mourning of the loss, and the comfort extended to the grieving. New death care rituals were the outcome of a substantive industrialization process in the early 1900s in which many moved into the middle class and secured a "new place" in the transition from a New South to a Modern South. Social etiquette relegated grief to a private concern, not one to be openly shared in public except at the funeral. Writers found ways to refer to death in a genteel language that implied a continuing Victorian melodramatic flourish. Changes in printing press technology also contributed to shifting attitudes toward death.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Death and the American South , pp. 207 - 228Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014