Misery's Mathematics : Mourning, Compensation, and Reality in Antebellum American Literature

Misery's Mathematics reveals the strain of a moment in American cultural history that led several remarkable writers - including Emerson, Warner, Melville and Hawthorn - to render the stark rupture of loss in innovative ways.

Pushing Protestant culture's sense of loss into secular terrain, these four key writers rejected Calvinist and sentimental models of bereavement, creating instead the compensations of a mature American literature whose 'originality' stems from its capacity to mourn the loss of a common culture and, through such mourning, to assent to new social and cultural realities.

Peter Balaam locates this appeal to 'reality' in the analogies antebellum writers draw between their experience of bereavement and the experiences of uncertainty and disillusionment that following the revolutions in science, the winding down of creedal systems and the economic instability that typified the pre-Civil War era.