Patricia Rae

Bio

Patricia Rae is Professor Emeritus of English at Queen’s University. She is the author of The Practical Muse: Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme, Pound and Stevens and the editor of Modernism and Mourning and the forthcoming Approaches to Teaching the Works of George Orwell. She has published widely on modernist poetry; on elegy and commemoration; on British literature in the 1930s; and on the literature and culture of the Spanish Civil War.

Contributions

Towards a Creaturely Elegy

Peer Reviewed

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After years of teaching and writing about elegy I’ve concluded that this is work in which the intellectual and the personal are deeply intertwined. Many of the colleagues with whom I collaborated on Modernism and Mourning (2007) were motivated in their work, as was I, by their own experiences with grief. Many of my students have told me about the solace they have found in the elegiac poems and memoirs we’ve studied. When preparing to present a literary studies perspective at an interdisciplinary conference on “Death and Dying” in 2018, I sought to widen my understanding of mourning by studying the manuals consulted by bereavement therapists. Those clinical accounts of grief taught me not to overestimate the utility of poetic elegies. At the same time, they seemed impoverished, lac

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elegy animals