Dying Modern

"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

"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

“[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

“[An] elegant meditation. . . . Even Fuss admits that she is surprised that ‘her little book on elegy . . . [which] I thought was about dyig quietly evolved into a book about surviving. It is a pleasure to be surprised alongside her.” - Sally Connolly, TLS

“This book is an erudite, beautifully written study of them. If you’re a lover of Emily Dickinson’s work or that of Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, or Richard Wilbur, you will want to read this book. If you teach literary criticism or simply love poetry, you will want to read Fuss’s book. Superb book.” - Hope Leman, Critical Margins

“In a luminous, beautifully considered study of the modern elegy, Fuss (Princeton) demonstrates the ways that poets have creatively imagined modes of talking about the dead...Highly recommended.” - D. A. Henningfeld, Choice

“[Fuss] argues persuasively for the continued value of the consolatory elegy and examines “the ethical dimentions of the modern elegy.”... [A] concise, insightful, meditative book.” - Barbara Kelly, Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin

"An exceptionally lively, often glitteringly witty essay on the vagaries, contents, and discontents of nineteenth- and twentieth-century elegy, a genrewhose fate, in England and America, has been radically disrupted and even, sometimes, deformed by the cultural fate of modern death itself."  - Sandra Gilbert, Literature and Medicine