The Cambridge Introduction to Walt Whitman ( Cambridge Introductions to Literature )

Publication series :Cambridge Introductions to Literature

Author: M. Jimmie Killingsworth  

Publisher: Cambridge University Press‎

Publication year: 2007

E-ISBN: 9780511271410

P-ISBN(Paperback): 9780521854566

Subject: I106 the classics and study

Keyword: 作品评论和研究

Language: ENG

Access to resources Favorite

Disclaimer: Any content in publications that violate the sovereignty, the constitution or regulations of the PRC is not accepted or approved by CNPIEC.

The Cambridge Introduction to Walt Whitman

Description

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.

Chapter

The war and its aftermath (1861–1873)

The period of reflection and decline (1873–1892)

Chapter 2 Historical and cultural contexts

Democracy

The body

The land

The culture

Chapter 3 Poetry before the Civil War

1855: “Song of Myself”

The poem conducts a radical experiment in poetic form

The poem embodies the ideals of personality within the context of political democracy

The poem spiritualizes the body and materializes the soul in an effort to reinvigorate the religious experience

The poem uses catalogues of images and vignettes to suggest the open-ended and endlessly varied range of experience within modern life

The poem pushes the limits of human knowledge and language

Other poems dating from the 1855 Leaves of Grass

1856: poems of sexuality and the body

1856: poems of the earth

1856: “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”

1860: Sea-Drift poems

1860: gendered clusters – “Children of Adam” and “Calamus”

Chapter 4 Poetry after the Civil War

Elegiac poems

Poems of the battlefield and war hospital

The Lincoln poems

Later elegiac writing

The emergence of the image

From visionary to visual poetics

The later imagist poems

Minor poetic modes

Occasional poems

Messenger poems

Chapter 5 Prose works

The 1855 Preface

Democratic Vistas

Specimen Days

Memoir

Nature writing

Travel writing

Chapter 6 Critical reception

The first fifty years, 1855–1905

1905–1955

1955–2005

Notes

1 Life

2 Historical and cultural contexts

3 Poetry before the Civil War

4 Poetry after the Civil War

5 Prose works

6 Critical reception

Further reading

Index

The users who browse this book also browse


No browse record.