Parting Words

Parting Words

This collection captures the voice and the vision of a treasured preacher, pastor, and bishop. And so for these past thirteen-plus years, if there has been one watchword on my lips it has been, “Please be patient with me, 'cause God isn't through with me yet.” And God still is not finished with me. Nor is God through with any of us yet. So I pray that you will continue to go from strength to strength, in God's joyful service as you are reshaped, remolded, reequipped and re-empowered in the days and weeks and months and years ahead.

Parting Words

Valedictory addresses offer a way to conceptualize the relation of self to others, private to public, ephemeral to eternal. Whether deathbed pronouncements, political capitulations, or seafaring farewells, "parting words" played a crucial role in the social imagination of Victorian writing. In this compelling new book, Justin Sider traces these public addresses across a wide range of works, from poems by Byron, Tennyson, and Browning, to essays by Twain and Wilde, to novels by Dickens and Eliot. Ironically, while the Victorian era saw the loss of faith in a unitary national public, it asked poetry to address just such a public. Attending to the form, rather than the discursive content, of poets' engagement with public culture, Parting Words explains how the valedictory allowed Victorian poets to explore the ways their poems might be received by distant and anonymous readers in an emergent mass culture. Using a wide array of materials such as letters and reviews to describe the rapidly changing print culture in which poets were intervening, Sider shows how the growing diversification and destabilization of the Victorian reading public was countered by the demand for a public poetry. Characteristically, the speakers of Tennyson's "Ulysses" and Matthew Arnold's "Empedocles on Etna" imagine their farewells as simultaneous entrances into a public space where they and their readers, however distant, might yet meet. This new consciousness anticipated modernist poetry, which in turn used the valedictory to underscore the futility and alienation of such hopes.

Parting Words, Or The Scriptures the Christian's Birthright; a Sermon ...