Download or read book Disseminating Whitman written by Michael Moon and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the study of local history. Contains a 30 page bibliography. Acidic paper. Moon (English, Duke U.) radically reassess the through close analysis of the first four revisions of Leaves of grass--not to discover which is better, but to glean insight from the pattern and content of the modifications, to show how they intersect with the poet's representation of male-male desire throughout his writing. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book The Cambridge Introduction to Walt Whitman written by M. Jimmie Killingsworth and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-08 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walt Whitman is one of the most innovative and influential American poets of the nineteenth century. Focusing on his masterpiece Leaves of Grass, this book provides a foundation for the study of Whitman as an experimental poet, a radical democrat, and a historical personality in the era of the American Civil War, the growth of the great cities, and the westward expansion of the United States. Always a controversial and important figure, Whitman continues to attract the admiration of poets, artists, critics, political activists, and readers around the world. Those studying his work for the first time will find this an invaluable book. Alongside close readings of the major texts, chapters on Whitman's biography, the history and culture of his time, and the critical reception of his work provide a comprehensive understanding of Whitman and of how he has become such a central figure in the American literary canon.

Download or read book Whitman Melville Crane and the Labors of American Poetry written by Peter Riley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-23 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Whitman, Melville, Crane, and the Labors of American Poetry, Peter Riley confronts our enduring and problematic investment in poetic vocation—a myth, he argues, that continues to inform how all our multifarious labors are understood, valued, and exploited. The book seeks to challenge a dominant cultural logic that frames contingent, non-vocational labor as a necessary sacrifice that frustrates the righteous progress towards realizing that seemingly purest of callings: Poet. Incorporating the often overlooked or excluded workaday ephemera of three canonical US Romantic poets—Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Hart Crane—this volume offers new archival insights that call for a re-examination of celebrated literary careers and disputes their status as renowned or tragic icons of creative vocation. The poetry of Whitman the real estate dealer, Melville the customs inspector, and Crane the copywriter, Riley contends, does not constitute the formal inscription of an antagonistic or discreet poetic labor struggling against quotidian work towards the fulfilment of exceptional individual callings. Instead, the distracted forms of their poetry are always already intermingled with a variety of apparently lesser labors. Ousting poetic production from its default sanctuary of privileged exemption or transcendent repose, the volume refigures the work of the poet as a living sensuous activity that transgresses labor's various divisions and hierarchies. It consequently recasts the poet as a figure who actually unfastens the 'right of passage' vocational logic that does so much to secure and reproduce the current neoliberal paradigm.

Download or read book Walt Whitman in Context written by Joanna Levin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walt Whitman is a poet of contexts. His poetic practice was one of observing, absorbing, and then reflecting the world around him. Walt Whitman in Context provides brief, provocative explorations of thirty-eight different contexts - geographic, literary, cultural, and political - through which to engage Whitman's life and work. Written by distinguished scholars of Whitman and nineteenth-century American literature and culture, this collection synthesizes scholarly and historical sources and brings together new readings and original research.

Download or read book American Poetic Materialism from Whitman to Stevens written by Mark Noble and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In American Poetic Materialism from Whitman to Stevens, Mark Noble examines writers who rethink the human in material terms. Do our experiences correlate to our material elements? Do visions of a common physical ground imply a common purpose? Noble proposes new readings of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, George Santayana and Wallace Stevens that explore a literary history wrestling with the consequences of its own materialism. At a moment when several new models of the relationship between human experience and its physical ground circulate among critical theorists and philosophers of science, this book turns to poets who have long asked what our shared materiality can tell us about our prospects for new models of our material selves.

Download or read book Bohemia in America 1858 1920 written by Joanna Levin and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009-10-21 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bohemia in America, 1858–1920 explores the construction and emergence of "Bohemia" in American literature and culture. Simultaneously a literary trope, a cultural nexus, and a socio-economic landscape, la vie bohème traveled to the United States from the Parisian Latin Quarter in the 1850s. At first the province of small artistic coteries, Bohemia soon inspired a popular vogue, embodied in restaurants, clubs, neighborhoods, novels, poems, and dramatic performances across the country. Levin's study follows la vie bohème from its earliest expressions in the U.S. until its explosion in Greenwich Village in the 1910s. Although Bohemia was everywhere in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture, it has received relatively little scholarly attention. Bohemia in America, 1858–1920 fills this critical void, discovering and exploring the many textual and geographic spaces in which Bohemia was conjured. Joanna Levin not only provides access to a neglected cultural phenomenon but also to a new and compelling way of charting the development of American literature and culture.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman written by Kenneth M. Price and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Handbook on Walt Whitman that reflects the best new work in the field including chapters that set his work within the context of digital scholarship, discussion of new manuscript discoveries and transcriptions, exploration of environmental angles on Whitman, and a focus on disability studies.

Download or read book Whitman s Drift written by Matt Cohen and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2017-07 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American ninteenth century witnessed a media explosion unprecedented in human history, and Walt Whitman's poetry reveled in the potentials of his time: "See, the many-cylinder'd steam printing-press, " he wrote. "See, the electric telegraph, stretching across the Continent, from the Western Sea to Manhattan." Still, as the budding poet learned, books neither sell themselves nor move themselves: without an efficient set of connections to get books to readers, the democratic, media-saturated future that Whitman imagined would have remained warehoused. Whitman's works sometimes ran through the "many-cylinder'd steam printing-press" and were carried in bulk on "the strong and quick locomotive." Yet during his career, his publications did not follow a progressive path toward mass production and distribution. Whitman's Drift asks how the many options for distributing books and newspapers shaped the way writers wrote and readers read. Studying nineteenth-century literature and how it circulated can help us understand not just how to read Whitman's works and times, but how to understand what is happening to our imaginations now, in the midst of the twenty-first century media explosion. -- from back cover.

Download or read book Walt Whitman s Songs of Male Intimacy and Love written by Walt Whitman and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his 1859 “Live Oak, with Moss,” Walt Whitman’s unpublished sheaf of twelve poems on manly passion, the poet dreams of a city where men who love men can live and love openly. The revised “Live Oak, with Moss” poems became “Calamus,” Whitman’s cluster of poems on “adhesive” and manly love, comradeship, and democracy, in Leaves of Grass. Commemorating both the first publication of the “Calamus” poems and the little-known manuscript of notebook poems out of which the “Calamus” cluster grew, Whitman scholar Betsy Erkkila brings together in a single edition for the first time the “Live Oak, with Moss” poems, the 1860 “Calamus” poems, and the final 1881 “Calamus” poems. In addition to honoring the sesquicentennial of the “Calamus” cluster, she celebrates the ongoing legacy of Whitman’s songs of manly passion, sex, and love. The volume begins with Whitman’s elegantly handwritten manuscript of the “Live Oak, with Moss” poems, printed side by side with a typeset transcription and followed by a facsimile of the 1860 version of the “Calamus” poems. The concluding section reprints the final version of the “Calamus” poems from the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass. In an afterword, Erkkila discusses the radical nature of these poems in literary, sexual, and social history; the changes Whitman made in the “Live Oak” and “Calamus” poems in the post–Civil War and Reconstruction years; the literary, political, and other contests surrounding the poems; and the constitutive role the poems have played in the emergence of modern heterosexual and homosexual identity in the United States and worldwide. The volume closes with a selected bibliography of works that have contributed to the critical and interpretive struggles around Whitman’s man-loving life. One hundred and fifty years after Whitman’s brave decision to speak publicly about a fully realized democracy, his country is still locked in a struggle over the rights of homosexuals. These public battles have been at the very center of controversies over the life, work, and legacy of Walt Whitman, America’s (and the world’s) major poet of democracy and its major singer of what he called “manly love” in all its moods. Together the poems in this omnibus volume affirm his creation of a radical new language designed to convey and affirm the poet’s man love.

Download or read book Whitman Possessed written by Mark Maslan and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-04-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whitman has long been more than a celebrated American author. He has become a kind of hero, whose poetry vindicates beliefs not only about poetry but also about sexuality and power. In Whitman Possessed: Poetry, Sexuality, and Popular Authority, Mark Maslan presents a challenging theory of Whitman's poetics of possession and his understandings of individual and national identity. By reading his works in relation to nineteenth-century theories of sexual desire, poetic inspiration, and political representation, Maslan argues that the disintegration of individuality in Whitman's texts is not meant to undermine cultural hierarchies, but to make poetic and political authority newly viable. In particular, Maslan explores the social impact of nineteenth-century sexual hygiene literature on Whitman's works. He argues that Whitman developed his ideas about poetry, sexuality, and authority by responding to a prominent argument that desire subjected male bodies to a penetrating and feminizing force. By identifying poetic inspiration with this erotic dynamic, Whitman imbued his poetic voice with a kind of transformative power. Whitman aligned his poetry with an impartial authority hard to find elsewhere and inclined his work as a poet to speak for the voiceless, for the masses, and for an entire nation.

Download or read book A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman written by David S. Reynolds and published by Historical Guides to American Authors. This book was released on 2000 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Guide combines contemporary cultural studies and historical scholarship to illuminate Whitman's diverse contexts. The essays explore dimensions of Whitman's dynamic relationship to working-class politics, race and slavery, sexual mores, the visual arts & the idea of democracy.

Download or read book American Poetry in Performance written by Tyler Hoffman and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2013-05-29 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Performance Poetry is the first book to trace a comprehensive history of performance poetry in America from Whitman through the rap-meets-poetry scene and to show how the performance of poetry is bound up with the performance of identity and nationality in the modern period. This book will be a meaningful contribution both to the field of American poetry studies and to the fields of cultural and performance studies, as it focuses on poetry that refuses the status of fixed aesthetic object and, in its variability, performs versions of race, class, gender, and sexuality both on and off the page. Relating the performance of poetry to shifting political and cultural ideologies in the United States, Hoffman argues that the vocal aspect of public poetry possesses (or has been imagined to possess) the ability to help construct both national and subaltern communities. In doing so, American Performance Poetry explores public poets’ confrontations with emergent sound recording and communications technologies as those confrontations shape their mythologies of the spoken word and their corresponding notions about America and Americanness.

Download or read book Whitman and the Romance of Medicine written by Robert Leigh Davis and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this compelling, accessible examination of one of America's greatest cultural and literary figures, Robert Leigh Davis details the literary and social significance of Walt Whitman's career as a nurse during the American Civil War. Davis shows how the concept of "convalescence" in nineteenth-century medicine and philosophy—along with Whitman's personal war experiences—provide a crucial point of convergence for Whitman's work as a gay and democratic writer. In his analysis of Whitman's writings during this period—Drum-Taps, Democratic Vistas, Memoranda During the War, along with journalistic works and correspondence—Davis argues against the standard interpretation that Whitman's earliest work was his best. He finds instead that Whitman's hospital writings are his most persuasive account of the democratic experience. Deeply moved by the courage and dignity of common soldiers, Whitman came to identify the Civil War hospitals with the very essence of American democratic life, and his writing during this period includes some of his most urgent reflections on suffering, sympathy, violence, and love. Davis concludes this study with an essay on the contemporary medical writer Richard Selzer, who develops the implications of Whitman's ideas into a new theory of medical narrative.

Download or read book The Pragmatic Whitman written by Stephen John Mack and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2005-04 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this surprisingly timely book, Stephen Mack examines Whitman’s particular and fascinating brand of patriotism: his far-reaching vision of democracy. For Whitman, loyalty to America was loyalty to democracy. Since the idea that democracy is not just a political process but a social and cultural process as well is associated with American pragmatism, Mack relies on the pragmatic tradition of Emerson, James, Dewey, Mead, and Rorty to demonstrate the ways in which Whitman resides in this tradition. Mack analyzes Whitman's democratic vision both in its parts and as a whole; he also describes the ways in which Whitman's vision evolved throughout his career. He argues that Whitman initially viewed democratic values such as individual liberty and democratic processes such as collective decision-making as fundamental, organic principles, free and unregulated. But throughout the 1860s and 1870s Whitman came to realize that democracy entailed processes of human agency that are more deliberate and less natural—that human destiny is largely the product of human effort, and a truly humane society can be shaped only by intelligent human efforts to govern the forces that would otherwise govern us. Mack describes the foundation of Whitman’s democracy as found in the 1855 and 1856 editions of Leaves of Grass, examines the ways in which Whitman’s 1859 sexual crisis and the Civil War transformed his democratic poetics in “Sea-Drift,” “Calamus,” Drum-Taps,and Sequel to Drum-Taps, and explores Whitman’s mature vision in Democratic Vistas, concluding with observations on its moral and political implications today. Throughout, he illuminates Whitman's great achievement—learning that a full appreciation for the complexities of human life meant understanding that liberty can take many different and conflicting forms—and allows us to contemplate the relevance of that achievement at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Download or read book The Erotic Whitman written by Vivian R. Pollak and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2000-08-04 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative analysis of Whitman's exemplary quest for happiness, Vivian Pollak skillfully explores the intimate relationships that contributed to his portrayal of masculinity in crisis. She maintains that in representing himself as a characteristic nineteenth-century American and in proposing to heal national ills, Whitman was trying to temper his own inner conflicts as well. The poet's expansive vision of natural eroticism and of unfettered comradeship between democratic equals was, however, only part of the story. As Whitman waged a conscious campaign to challenge misogynistic and homophobic literary codes, he promoted a raceless, classless ideal of sexual democracy that theoretically equalized all varieties of desire and resisted none. Pollak suggests that this goal remains imperfectly achieved in his writings, which liberates some forbidden voices and silences others. Integrating biography and criticism, Pollak employs a loosely chronological organization to describe the poet's multifaceted "faith in sex." Drawing on his early fiction, journalism, poetry, and self-reviews, as well as letters and notebook entries, she shows how in spite of his personal ambivalence about sustained erotic intimacy, Whitman came to imagine himself as "the phallic choice of America."

Download or read book American Metempsychosis written by John Michael Corrigan and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “transmigration of souls is no fable. I would it were, but men and women are only half human.” With these words, Ralph Waldo Emerson confronts a dilemma that illuminates the formation of American individualism: to evolve and become fully human requires a heightened engagement with history. Americans, Emerson argues, must realize history’s chronology in themselves—because their own minds and bodies are its evolving record. Whereas scholarship has tended to minimize the mystical underpinnings of Emerson’s notion of the self, his depictions of “the metempsychosis of nature” reveal deep roots in mystical traditions from Hinduism and Buddhism to Platonism and Christian esotericism. In essay after essay, Emerson uses metempsychosis as an open-ended template to understand human development. In Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman transforms Emerson’s conception of metempsychotic selfhood into an expressly poetic event. His vision of transmigration viscerally celebrates the poet’s ability to assume and live in other bodies; his American poet seeks to incorporate the entire nation into his own person so that he can speak for every man and woman.

Download or read book Whitman s Presence written by Tenney Nathanson and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1994-03 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Nathanson addresses with renewed insight a problem that has vexed Whitman scholars at least since James E. Miller, Jr.'s A Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass turned Whitman into a respectable academic subject; that is, the unusual status of Whitman's poetic voice. . . . The overall result is the finest articulation of Whitman's project in existence." —Donald Pease, Department of English, Dartmouth College "What enables Nathanson to perform a feat no other critic has accomplished depends as much on his awareness of a range of thinkers from Wittgenstein to J.L. Austin and Derrida as on his sense of the qualities of poetry: he gives the term presence a cultural as well as poetic significance which opens out to cultural history, and makes Whitman as much a representative presence in the culture as our unequalled poet. I see this as a central book about our literature." —Quentin Anderson, J.C. Levi Professor in the Humanities Emeritus, Columbia University