The essays collected here, written for this volume by an international team of distinguished Whitman scholars, examine a variety of issues in Whitman's life and art. Their varying approaches mirror the diversity of contemporary scholarship and the breadth of target that Whitman affords for such examination. The authors of these essays address a wide range of issues befitting a poet of his stature and ambiguity: Whitman and photography, Whitman and feminist scholarship, Whitman and modernism, Whitman and the poetics of address, Whitman and the poetics of present participles, Whitman and Borges, Whitman and Isadora Duncan, Whitman and the Civil War, Whitman and the politics of his era, and Whitman and the changing nature of his style in his later years. Addressed to an audience of students and general readers and written in a nontechnical prose designed to promote accessibility to the study of Whitman, this volume includes a chronology of Whitman's life and suggestions for further readin
George Palmer Putnam (1814–1872) was arguably the most important American publisher of the nineteenth century, a man fully and multiply involved in developments transforming all aspects of literary cu
In Walt Whitman and the American Reader, Ezra Greenspan casts Whitman as the central actor on the stage of nineteenth-century American literary culture - a culture redefining its democratic identity. Against the context of the major changes revolutionising the professions of printer, publisher, bookseller and author, he examines the connection between the bookmaking culture of mid-century and Leaves of Grass, and between the conditions for authorship and Whitman's career. The result is a far-ranging study of Whitman as a model of the nineteenth-century American writer writing for - and sometimes reacting against - the newly enfranchised, expanded reading public of his time.
This sourcebook includes the full text of Song of Myself. Since 1855, Walt Whitman's Song of Myself has been enjoyed, debated, parodied and imitated by readers, critics and artists crossing national a
Born into slavery in Kentucky, William Wells Brown (1814-1884) was kept functionally illiterate until after his escape at the age of nineteen. Remarkably, he became the most widely published and versa
First published in 1923, this anthology provides a cross-section of Lawrence's writing on American literature. It includes landmark essays on Benjamin Franklin, Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Natha
