This text explores representations of bereavement and mourning in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Susan Warner, and Herman Melville (from whose story "The Encantadas: or, the Enchanted
Isles" (1854) the titular phrase "misery's mathematics" is taken). Each of the authors under study, goes the argument, rejected their era's norms of sentimental bereavement and the more facile
conventions of liberal Protestant piety, regarding them as inadequate to the real misery and mysteriousness of loss. Instead, their works "envision new theodicies, new forms of sovereignty and
order with which to illuminate the continuity behind even the most wrenching particular losses and thereby to make it more bearable." Annotation 穢2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
(booknews.com)
