ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a body of consolation literature that has, for the most part, fallen outside the purview of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century criticism: anthologies of infant elegies. The tables of contents of anthologies of infant elegies, however, single-handedly refute the enduring feminization of the nineteenth-century infant elegy. Abigail Howe's transcription of the poem enacts precisely the type of sentimental identification on which anthologies of infant elegies rely, and which they perpetuate. The editorial conventions that shape and take shape in these anthologies both capitalize on and contribute to the poems' anonymity. The economic concerns and consolatory aspirations of these anthologies could be construed as at odds with the interests of the individual authors of the poems they present. 'What Will Jesus Say?' enacts both the transformation of a dead child into the figure of a dead child and the re-identifying of that figure by sentimental identification.
