Download or read book Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity written by David Haven Blake and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the relationship between poetry and fame? What happens to a reader's experience when a poem invokes its author's popularity? Is there a meaningful connection between poetry and advertising, between the rhetoric of lyric and the rhetoric of hype? One of the first full-scale treatments of celebrity in nineteenth-century America, this book examines Walt Whitman's lifelong interest in fame and publicity. Making use of notebooks, photographs, and archival sources, David Haven Blake provides a groundbreaking history of the rise of celebrity culture in the United States. He sees Leaves of Grass alongside the birth of commercial advertising and the nation's growing obsession with the lives of the famous and the renowned. As authors, lecturers, politicians, entertainers, and clergymen vied for popularity, Whitman developed a form of poetry that routinely promoted and, indeed, celebrated itself. Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity proposes a fundamentally new way of thinking about a seminal American poet and a major national icon.
Download or read book Walt Whitman s America written by David S. Reynolds and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-05-04 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award and Finalist for the National for the Book Critics Circle Award In his poetry Walt Whitman set out to encompass all of America and in so doing heal its deepening divisions. This magisterial biography demonstrates the epic scale of his achievement, as well as the dreams and anxieties that impelled it, for it places the poet securely within the political and cultural context of his age. Combing through the full range of Whitman's writing, David Reynolds shows how Whitman gathered inspiration from every stratum of nineteenth-century American life: the convulsions of slavery and depression; the raffish dandyism of the Bowery "b'hoys"; the exuberant rhetoric of actors, orators, and divines. We see how Whitman reconciled his own sexuality with contemporary social mores and how his energetic courtship of the public presaged the vogues of advertising and celebrity. Brilliantly researched, captivatingly told, Walt Whitman's America is a triumphant work of scholarship that breathes new life into the biographical genre.
Download or read book Literary Celebrity and Public Life in the Nineteenth Century United States written by Bonnie Carr O'Neill and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2017-10-15 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through extended readings of the works of P. T. Barnum, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and Fanny Fern, Bonnie Carr O’Neill shows how celebrity culture authorizes audiences to evaluate public figures on personal terms and in so doing reallocates moral, intellectual, and affective authority and widens the public sphere. O’Neill examines how celebrity culture creates a context in which citizens regard one another as public figures while elevating individual public figures to an unprecedented personal fame. Although this new publicity fosters nationalism, it also imbues public life with personal feeling and transforms the public sphere into a site of divisive, emotionally intense debate. Further, O’Neill analyzes how celebrity culture’s scrutiny of the lives and personalities of public figures collapses distinctions between the public and private spheres and, as a consequence, challenges assumptions about the self and personhood. Celebrity culture intensifies the complex emotions and debates surrounding already-fraught questions of national belonging and democratic participation even as, for some, it provides a means of redefining personhood and cultural identity. O’Neill offers a new critical approach within the growing scholarship on celebrity studies by exploring the relationship between the emergence of celebrity culture and civic discourse. Her careful readings unravel the complexities of a form of publicity that fosters both mass consumption and cultural criticism.
Download or read book American Bards written by Edward Keyes Whitley and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Edward Whitley's book maps James M. Whitfield, Eliza R. Snow, and John Rollin Ridge prominently onto nineteenth-century American poetic history as a group of poets seeking to become national bards not by embracing the traditional trappings of nationalism
Download or read book Walt Whitman Where the Future Becomes Present written by David Haven Blake and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2008-04 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walt Whitman, Where the Future Becomes Present invigorates Whitman studies by garnering insights from a diverse group of writers and intellectuals. Writing from the perspectives of art history, political theory, creative writing, and literary criticism, the contributors place Whitman in the center of both world literature and American public life. The volume is especially notable for being the best example yet published of what the editors call the New Textuality in Whitman studies, an emergent mode of criticism that focuses on the different editions of Whitman’s poems as independent works of art.
Download or read book Wilde in America Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity written by David M. Friedman and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-10-06 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Oscar Wilde’s landmark 1882 American tour explains how this quotable literary eminence became famous for being famous. On January 3, 1882, Oscar Wilde, a twenty-seven-year-old “genius”—at least by his own reckoning—arrived in New York. The Dublin-born Oxford man had made such a spectacle of himself in London with his eccentric fashion sense, acerbic wit, and extravagant passion for art and home design that Gilbert & Sullivan wrote an operetta lampooning him. He was hired to go to America to promote that work by presenting lectures on interior decorating. But Wilde had his own business plan. He would go to promote himself. And he did, traveling some 15,000 miles and visiting 150 American cities as he created a template for fame creation that still works today. Though Wilde was only the author of a self-published book of poems and an unproduced play, he presented himself as a “star,” taking the stage in satin breeches and a velvet coat with lace trim as he sang the praises of sconces and embroidered pillows—and himself. What Wilde so presciently understood is that fame could launch a career as well as cap one. David M. Friedman’s lively and often hilarious narrative whisks us across nineteenth-century America, from the mansions of Gilded Age Manhattan to roller-skating rinks in Indiana, from an opium den in San Francisco to the bottom of the Matchless silver mine in Colorado—then the richest on earth—where Wilde dined with twelve gobsmacked miners, later describing their feast to his friends in London as “First course: whiskey. Second course: whiskey. Third course: whiskey.” But, as Friedman shows, Wilde was no mere clown; he was a strategist. From his antics in London to his manipulation of the media—Wilde gave 100 interviews in America, more than anyone else in the world in 1882—he designed every move to increase his renown. There had been famous people before him, but Wilde was the first to become famous for being famous. Wilde in America is an enchanting tale of travel and transformation, comedy and capitalism—an unforgettable story that teaches us about our present as well as our past.
Download or read book The Other Journal The Celebrity Issue written by Christopher J. Keller and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2011-05-01 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Other Journal's first print edition focuses on the role of celebrity in North American culture--its phenomena, its significance, its utility. The articles illuminate different facets of celebrity culture through multiple vantage points and methodologies.Ê This issue features articles, art exhibits, and interviews by such prominent thinkers as Graham Ward, Carl Raschke, James K. A. Smith, James Davison Hunter, Brian McLaren, Luci Shaw, Gary Dorrien, and many others. Essays and reviews by Ruth Adams, Paul Jaussen, Katie Kresser, James K. A. Smith, Brad Elliott Stone, Gary David Stratton, Kj Swanson, John Totten, and Graham Ward Interviews by Allison Backous, David Horstkoetter, Chris Keller, Tom Ryan, James K. A. Smith, and Heather Smith Stringer with Gary Dorrien, Ron Hansen, James Davison Hunter, Brian McLaren, Carl Raschke, and the Opiate Mass Creative writing and poetry by Daniel Bowman, Jr., Joel Heng Hartse, Luci Shaw, and Schuy R. Weishaar
Download or read book Lady Romeo written by Tana Wojczuk and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction Finalist for the Marfield Prize For fans of Book of Ages and American Eve, this “lively, illuminating new biography” (The Boston Globe) of 19th-century queer actress Charlotte Cushman portrays a “brisk, beautifully crafted life” (Stacy Schiff, bestselling author of The Witches and Cleopatra) that riveted New York City and made headlines across America. All her life, Charlotte Cushman refused to submit to others’ expectations. Raised in Boston at the time of the transcendentalists, a series of disasters cleared the way for her life on the stage—a path she eagerly took, rejecting marriage and creating a life of adventure, playing the role of the hero in and out of the theater as she traveled to New Orleans and New York City, and eventually to London and back to build a successful career. Her Hamlet, Romeo, Lady Macbeth, and Nancy Sykes from Oliver Twist became canon, impressing Louisa May Alcott, who later based a character on her in Jo’s Boys, and Walt Whitman, who raved about “the towering grandeur of her genius” in his columns for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. She acted alongside Edwin and John Wilkes Booth—supposedly giving the latter a scar on his neck that was later used to identify him as President Lincoln’s assassin—and visited frequently with the Great Emancipator himself, who was a devoted Shakespeare fan and admirer of Cushman’s work. Her wife immortalized her in the angel at the top of Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain; worldwide, she was “a lady universally acknowledged as the greatest living tragic actress.” Behind the scenes, she was equally radical, making an independent income, supporting her family, creating one of the first bohemian artists’ colonies abroad, and living publicly as a queer woman. And yet, her name has since faded into the shadows. Now, her story comes to brilliant life with Tana Wojczuk’s Lady Romeo, an exhilarating and enlightening biography of the 19th-century trailblazer. With new research and rarely seen letters and documents, Wojczuk reconstructs the formative years of Cushman’s life, set against the excitement and drama of 1800s New York City and featuring a cast of luminaries and revolutionaries who changed the cultural landscape of America forever. The story of an astonishing and uniquely American life, Lady Romeo reveals one of the most remarkable forgotten figures in our history and restores her to center stage, where she belongs.
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 Paul and the Ancient Celebrity Circuit written by James R. Harrison and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2019-11-18 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this study, James R. Harrison compares the modern cult of celebrity to the quest for glory in late republican and early imperial society. He shows how Paul's ethic of humility, based upon the crucified Christ, stands out in a world obsessed with mutual comparison, boasting, and self-sufficiency." --
Download or read book Walt Whitman written by David S. Reynolds and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2005 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Portrays Walt Whitman in the social, political, and cultural context of his day.
Download or read book Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture written by J. Gerald Kennedy and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2012-12-19 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Remapping Antebellum Print Culture scholars explore Poe s antinationalistic Americanism as they redefine the outlines of antebellum print culture and challenge ideas that situate Poe at the margins of national thought and cultural activity.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman written by and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-01 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than a century after his death, Walt Whitman remains a fresh phenomenon. Startling discoveries and massive transcription efforts are enabling new insights into his life and achievements. In the past few years new breakthroughs have proliferated, including the publication of a long-lost Whitman novel, Jack Engle, along with a hitherto unknown health guide for urban men and previously undiscovered poems. Myriad other documents have become more readily available, including largely unmined troves of journalism, narrative and documentary prose, and experimental note-keeping. Leaves of Grass and Whitman's literary life as a whole are thus ripe for reconsideration. The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman embraces this expanded view of Whitman and charts new pathways in Whitman Studies by bringing in new perspectives, methods, and contexts.
Download or read book Censorship and Exile written by Johanna Hartmann and published by V&R unipress GmbH. This book was released on 2015 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collection Censorship and Exile focuses on the interrelations between the experience of exile and mechanisms of censorship. In the phenomenon of censorship the intersections and reciprocal tensions of the cultural and political spheres become drastically apparent. Literature as a form of cultural expression reacts to and criticizes ideological premises of certain political contexts. It thus represents a counter-discourse to processes of canonization that are prescribed and violently put into action by oppressive political regimes. Within the respective political contexts, people who demanded liberties such as freedom of speech or artistic freedom often found themselves forced into exile or internal emigration. The present volume focuses on these continuities and discontinuities, on commonly shared features as well as the heterogeneous manifestations of exile literature(s) in the face of practices of censorship and the repression of free speech and artistic freedom in Germany, the US and beyond. The collection comprises contributions that shed light on the interrelation of censorship and exile from comparative, historical, political, and creative perspectives.
Download or read book Listening and Longing written by Daniel Cavicchi and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Northeast Popular Culture Association’s Peter C. Rollins Book Award (2012) Winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award (2012) Listening and Longing explores the emergence of music listening in the United States, from its early stages in the antebellum era, when entrepreneurs first packaged and sold the experience of hearing musical performance, to the Gilded Age, when genteel critics began to successfully redefine the cultural value of listening to music. In a series of interconnected stories, American studies scholar Daniel Cavicchi focuses on the impact of industrialization, urbanization, and commercialization in shaping practices of music audiences in America. Grounding our contemporary culture of listening in its seminal historical moment—before the iPod, stereo system, or phonograph—Cavicchi offers a fresh understanding of the role of listening in the history of music.
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 865 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 The King of Confidence written by Miles Harvey and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "unputdownable" (Dave Eggers, National Book award finalist) story of the most infamous American con man you've never heard of: James Strang, self-proclaimed divine king of earth, heaven, and an island in Lake Michigan, "perfect for fans of The Devil in the White City" (Kirkus) A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Longlisted for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction Finalist for the Midland Authors Annual Literary Award A Michigan Notable Book A CrimeReads Best True Crime Book of the Year "A masterpiece." —Nathaniel Philbrick In the summer of 1843, James Strang, a charismatic young lawyer and avowed atheist, vanished from a rural town in New York. Months later he reappeared on the Midwestern frontier and converted to a burgeoning religious movement known as Mormonism. In the wake of the murder of the sect's leader, Joseph Smith, Strang unveiled a letter purportedly from the prophet naming him successor, and persuaded hundreds of fellow converts to follow him to an island in Lake Michigan, where he declared himself a divine king. From this stronghold he controlled a fourth of the state of Michigan, establishing a pirate colony where he practiced plural marriage and perpetrated thefts, corruption, and frauds of all kinds. Eventually, having run afoul of powerful enemies, including the American president, Strang was assassinated, an event that was frontpage news across the country. The King of Confidence tells this fascinating but largely forgotten story. Centering his narrative on this charlatan's turbulent twelve years in power, Miles Harvey gets to the root of a timeless American original: the Confidence Man. Full of adventure, bad behavior, and insight into a crucial period of antebellum history, The King of Confidence brings us a compulsively readable account of one of the country's boldest con men and the boisterous era that allowed him to thrive.
