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Article: Elegies ending "here": the poetics of epitaphic closure (1).(Critical essay)
- Article from:
- Studies in the Literary Imagination
- Article date:
- March 22, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Georgia State University, Department of English. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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You too will say: here--here here is my finishing line.
--Aleksander Wat
In sixteenth-century England, literature in the graveyard--epitaphs--became literature of the graveyard. That is, writing that began insistently "here," as inscriptions on tombstones, often appeared as citations within other texts. Epitaphs, or references to them, emerge with increasing frequency in a number of Tudor and Stuart discourses, arising in part as a textual response to the dissolution of Catholic memorial practices. Epitaphs are replaced, or re-cited, in a striking range of contexts, from Elizabeth I's first speech to Parliament (in which she avows her virginity with a ...