Download or read book Whitman s Drama of Consensus written by Kerry C. Larson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this elegant study, Walt Whitman's democratic, consensual idealism emerges for the first time as truly central to his poetic achievement. Though Whitman's democratic idealism has often been dismissed as a blindness to the political complexities of his day, Kerry C. Larson argues that the poet was in fact vitally engaged in the problems of preserving social continuity at a time (1855-60) when the specter of disunion and fractricidal war grew increasingly ominous. Whitman conceived his poems as vehicles for social integration whose entire aim was to dramatize the joining of the many and the one, speaker and listener, universal and particular without subordinating either term. For Whitman, the poet's role was to be "the better President," the figure in whose person all contending interests and competing factions would be resolved. The importance of "drama" in Larson's title is borne out in his argument that Whitman's most memorable poems depict the goal of consent as an active process, something to be achieved rather than merely affirmed. By way of making this drama vivid, these poems project a fictive audience or interlocutor which, in being invoked by the poet, furnishes him with a partner in the ongoing dialogue of voices Leaves of Grass both embodies and records.
Download or read book Leaves of Grass written by Walt Whitman and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 1993-10-12 with total page 872 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains 383 of Whitman's poems first published in 1892.
Download or read book The Routledge Encyclopedia of Walt Whitman written by J.R. LeMaster and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-05 with total page 884 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Encyclopedia of Walt Whitman presents a comprehensive resource complied by over 200 internationally recognized contributors, including such leading Whitman scholars as James E. Miller, Jr., Roger Asselineau, Betsy Erkkila, and Joel Myerson. Now available for the first time in paperback, this volume comprises more than 750 entries arranged in convenient alphabetical format. Coverage includes: biographical information: all names, dates, places, and events important to understanding Whitman's life and career Whitman's works: essays on all eight editions of "Leaves of Grass," major poems and poem clusters, principal essays and prose works, as well as his more than two dozen short stories and the novel, Franklin Evans prominent themes and concepts: essays on such major topics as democracy, slavery, the Civil War, immortality, sexuality, and the women's rights movement. significant forms and techniques: such as prosody, symbolism, free verse, and humour important trends and critical approaches in Whitman studies: including new historicist and cultural criticism, psychological explorations, and controversial issues of sexual identity surveys of Whitman's international impact as well as an assessment of his literary legacy. Useful for students, researchers, librarians, teachers, and Whitman devotees, this volume features extensive cross-references, numerous photographs of the poet, a chronology, a special appendix section tracking the poet's genealogy, and a thorough index. Each entry includes a bibliography for further study.
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 American Bards written by Edward Whitley and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010-10-11 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walt Whitman has long been regarded as the quintessential American bard, the poet who best represents all that is distinctive about life in the United States. Whitman himself encouraged this view, but he was also quick to remind his readers that he was an unlikely candidate for the office of national poet, and that his working-class upbringing and radical take on human sexuality often put him at odds with American culture. While American literary history has tended to credit Whitman with having invented the persona of the national outsider as the national bard, Edward Whitley recovers three of Whitman's contemporaries who adopted similar personae: James M. Whitfield, an African American separatist and abolitionist; Eliza R. Snow, a Mormon pioneer and women's leader; and John Rollin Ridge, a Cherokee journalist and Native-rights advocate. These three poets not only provide a counterpoint to the Whitmanian persona of the outsider bard, but they also reframe the criteria by which generations of scholars have characterized Whitman as America's poet. This effort to resituate Whitman's place in American literary history provides an innovative perspective on the most familiar poet of the United States and the culture from which he emerged.
Download or read book Laughing at the Darkness Postmodernism and Optimism in American Humour written by Paul McDonald and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2010 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul McDonald's book is the second in the Humanities Ebooks Contemporary American Literature Series, edited by Christopher Gair and Aliki Varvogli. Given that postmodernism has been associated with doubt, chaos, relativism and the disappearance of reality, it may appear difficult to reconcile with American optimism. Laughing at the Darkness demonstrates that this is not always the case. In examining the work of, among others, Sherman Alexie, Woody Allen, Douglas Coupland, Jonathan Safran Foer, Bill Hicks, David Mamet, and Philip Roth, McDonald shows how American humourists bring their comedy to bear on some of the negative implications of philosophical postmodernism and, in so doing, explore ways of reclaiming value. Paul McDonald is the author of three other HEB titles, The Philosophy of Humour, Reading Morrison's Beloved, and Reading Heller's Catch-22, all available from Lulu.
Download or read book A Companion to Walt Whitman written by Donald D. Kummings and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprising more than 30 substantial essays written by leadingscholars, this companion constitutes an exceptionally broad-rangingand in-depth guide to one of America’s greatest poets. Makes the best and most up-to-date thinking on Whitmanavailable to students Designed to make readers more aware of the social and culturalcontexts of Whitman’s work, and of the experimental nature ofhis writing Includes contributions devoted to specific poetry and proseworks, a compact biography of the poet, and a bibliography
Download or read book Division and Imagined Unity in the American Renaissance written by Shawn Thomson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In examining the era’s multivalent tropes of seams and seamlessness, Thomson provides an innovative understanding of the interplay between division and unity in the thought, culture, and literature of the American Renaissance. New insights are offered on works by major authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Solomon Northup, Harriet Jacobs, and Elizabeth Stoddard, along with marginal figures. Thomson expands the canon by recovering the unknown authors Charles Edward Anthon and John S. Sauzade and recognizing their works as vital to the American Renaissance. Taking the 1844 display of the Holy Tunic at the Cathedral of Treves as its point of departure, Thomson sheds light on the controversy of the seamless garment in the New England press and explores its transmutation in Anthon’s Pilgrimage to Treves, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Dickinson’s poetry, and Melville’s major novels. In excavating seamlessness as a cultural artifact of the American Renaissance, Thomson pursues a cultural studies approach to the fabric of antebellum life. Thomson reads the seams of material culture to reveal the meaning of the dressing gown and the keepsake in Dickinson’s and Stoddard’s lives and letters. Thomson positions Sauzade’s Dickensian novel The Spuytenduyvel Chronicle as one of the first great works of the American metropolis and explores the spiritual-material dichotomy of the slave narratives of Douglass, Jacobs, and Northup. This book further reassesses the bitter literary rivalry between Melville and George Washington Peck, re-conceptualizes Melville the author through his relationship to the divided nation, and illuminates his failed idealism as a literary artist in Pierre. Thomson’s approach to the interrelationship of material culture, technology, and the modes of literary production creates a new sense of the American Renaissance as a paradoxical seamless whole wherein its seams are exposed for all to see.
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 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 Politics of Transparency in Modern American Fiction written by Paula Martín Salván and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A much-needed contribution to and critique of debates in the newly emerging field of transparency studies from the perspective of American literary studies. In the twenty-first century, transparency has become an ambiguous buzzword both in the public and the private realms (e.g. Wikileaks and the Snowden affair; social media). This volume takes its cue from the emerging field of transparency studies, recent scholarly work in sociology, political theory, and cultural studies that identifies a hegemonic rhetoric of transparency in public and political life. While scholars in this new field routinely gesture toward literature as the realm where secrecy may be productive, they rarely engage with literature directly, and literary studies itself remains notably absent from their debates. This collection of essays seeks to redress that state of affairs by focusing on literary texts written in an American cultural tradition steeped in the interplay between transparency and exposure, fear and secrecy, security and surveillance, and information and disinformation. The essays draw on authors ranging from Whitman, James, and Ellison to Pynchon, Morrison, and Eggers to argue that American literature complicates theoretical assumptions about transparency made in other disciplines. They question the field's strong theoretical emphasis on present-day technopolitical practices and discourses as the location of hegemonic discourse on transparency, and instead historicize such phenomena and extend them to discursive spheres that have so far been neglected (such as issues of sexuality and race). Edited by Paula Martâin-Salvâan and Sascha Pèohlmann. Contributors: Tomasz Basiuk, Jesâus Blanco Hidalga, Cristina Chevere÷san, Julia Faisst, Michel Feith, Juliâan Jimâenez Heffernan, Tiina Kèakelèa, Juan L. Pâerez-de-Luque, Umberto Rossi, Jelena éSesniâc, Toon Staes, Julia Straub, Alice Sundman"--
Download or read book Recovering the New written by Edward S. Cutler and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2003 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative look at the process and development of nineteenth-century modernism.
Download or read book Walt Whitman written by J. R. LeMaster and published by Routledge. This book was released on 1998 with total page 884 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes almost 760 entries ranging in length from 3,100 words on the first (1855) edition of Leaves of Grass to 140 words on Elizabeth Leavitt Keller. Entries include biographical data; thematic, formal and technical considerations; discussions of the poet's social and personal life; and commentary on all of Whitman's works, including poem clusters, major poems, essays, and lesser known works such as the novel Franklin Evans and two dozen short stories. A chronology and genealogy are included. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book The American Humanities Index written by Stephen H. Goode and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 980 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Writing Revolution written by Peter J. Bellis and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, formalist and deconstructive approaches to literary studies have been under attack, charged by critics with isolating texts as distinctive aesthetic or linguistic objects, separate from their social and historical contexts. Historicist and cultural approaches have often responded by simply reversing the picture, reducing texts to no more than superstructural effects of historical or ideological forces. In Writing Revolution, Peter J. Bellis explores the ways in which literature can engage with--rather than escape from or obscure--social and political issues. Bellis argues that a number of nineteenth-century American writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, saw their texts as spaces where alternative social and cultural possibilities could be suggested and explored. All writing in the same historical moment, Bellis's subjects were responding to the same cluster of issues: the need to redefine American identity after the Revolution, the problem of race slavery, and the growing industrialization of American society. Hawthorne, Bellis contends, sees the romance as "neutral territory" where the Imaginary and the Actual--the aesthetic and the historical--can interpenetrate and address crucial issues of class, race, and technological modernity. Whitman conceives of Leaves of Grass as a transformative democratic space where all forms of meditation, both political and literary, are swept away. Thoreau oscillates between these two approaches. Walden, like the romance, aims to fashion a mediating space between nature and society. His abolitionist essays, however, shift sharply away from both linguistic representation and the political, toward an apocalyptic cleansing violence. In addition to covering selected works by Hawthorne, Whitman, and Thoreau, Bellis also examines powerful works of social and political critique by Louisa May Alcott and Margaret Fuller. With its suggestions for new ways of reading antebellum American writing, Writing Revolution breaks through the thickets of contemporary literary discourse and will spark debate in the literary community.
Download or read book Concise Anthology of American Literature written by George McMichael and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 2418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The one-volume concise edition provides a varied representation of writers who give voice to the American experience. Although the concise edition offers fewer complete long works than the two-volume set, still included are Franklin, The Autobiography; Melville, Billy Budd; Miller, Death of a Salesman; and Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Download or read book This Mighty Convulsion written by Christopher Sten and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book exclusively devoted to the Civil War writings of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, arguably the most important poets of the war. The essays brought together in this volume add significantly to recent critical appreciation of the skill and sophistication of these poets; growing recognition of the complexity of their views of the war; and heightened appreciation for the anxieties they harbored about its aftermath. Both in the ways they come together and seem mutually influenced, and in the ways they disagree, Whitman and Melville grapple with the casualties, complications, and anxieties of the war while highlighting its irresolution. This collection makes clear that rather than simply and straightforwardly memorializing the events of the war, the poetry of Whitman and Melville weighs carefully all sorts of vexing questions and considerations, even as it engages a cultural politics that is never pat. Contributors: Kyle Barton, Peter Bellis, Adam Bradford, Jonathan A. Cook, Ian Faith, Ed Folsom, Timothy Marr, Cody Marrs, Christopher Ohge, Vanessa Steinroetter, Sarah L. Thwaites, Brian Yothers
