Dumb Beasts in Hallowed Tombs - Swedish Funerary Poetry for Animals 1670-1760

When Kersti Berg died in 1735, she was honoured with an obituary in the form of a poetic epitaph composed by Olof von Dalin. A modern-day reader can easily get the impression that Dalin's poem is an example of a funerary poem for a human being - one of the eighteenth century's most common poetic genres. Kersti Berg, however, was a dog, and Dalin's poem belongs to another genre, namely, the animal epitaph. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this was a frequently practised form of poetry which could be used for a great many purposes, from imitations of ancient originals to masked poems composed to convey a political message or to further the writer's career.

List of contents

Contents: Animal studies - Animal epitaph - Funerary poetry - Epitaph culture - Early modern literature - Occasional poetry - Rhetoric - Baroque - Panegyric - Erotic poetry - Court poetry - Imitatio - Decorum - 17th and 18th century Sweden - Charles XI - Charles XII - Israel Holmström - Sophia Elisabet Brenner - Olof von Dalin.

About the author

Daniel Möller has a doctorate in literature from Lund University, Sweden, where he is associate professor and does research on early modern literature.

Product details

• Authors: Daniel Möller
• Assisted by: Alan Crozier (Translation)
• Publisher: Peter Lang
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.12.2016
• EAN: 9783631659250
• ISBN: 978-3-631-65925-0
• No. of pages: 371
• Dimensions: 148 mm x 25 mm x 210 mm
• Weight: 600 g
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies