Acknowledgments  ix

Introduction  1

1. Dying . . . Words  9

poetry  10

consolation  12

defiance  20

banality  24

newness  31

lastness  35

2. Reviving . . . Corpses  44

comic  46

religious  50

political  57

historical  61

literary  67

poetic  73

3. Surviving . . . Lovers  78

loving  82

waiting  86

leaving  90

refusing  95

existing  98

surviving  102

Conclusion  107

Notes  113

Bibliography  131

Index  141

Copyright Acknowledgments  149

“[Fuss] approaches variations on the form of elegy with such complexity and acumen, and provides much insight into the complexities of our relation to death and the enigma of our simultaneous proximity and avoidance. These are things, after all, about which it can be almost impossible to talk.”—Diana Arterian , Los Angeles Review of Books

“[Fuss] approaches variations on the form of elegy with such complexity and acumen, and provides much insight into the complexities of our relation to death and the enigma of our simultaneous proximity and avoidance. These are things, after all, about which it can be almost impossible to talk.”—Diana Arterian , Los Angeles Review of Books

"Diana Fuss's exceptional meditative essay, Dying Modern, is a subtle Keatsian inquiry into the irresolvable, and therefore generative, tensions between genre and mode, and between historical contingency and the constancy of ethical commitments."—Max Cavitch, author of American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman

"Dying Modern is terrific. To have achieved so much in such a short, brisk, and eminently readable book; to have recovered such fascinating subgenres and thought through their interrelations; to have returned to the well-worn terrain of the elegy and come up with fresh insights and inventive readings—these are remarkable accomplishments."—Jahan Ramazani, author of Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney

"Celebrating poetry's power to bring anything, even death, to life, Diana Fuss's Dying Modern reanimates the elegy for our time. Bringing out the ethical call that echoes throughout the form, her voice becomes the perfect guide to the vanishing voices that elegy creates, preserves, and displaces at once. After reading this wonderful book you'll agree: death never had it so good."—Lee Edelman, author of No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive

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