Author: James Perrin Warren
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271073047
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
Combining intellectual history with literary analysis, this study of Whitman's language experiment from 1855 to 1892 offers a refreshing new look at his theory of language especially the English language in America—as an expression of a "national spirit" and relates that theory to the language and style of Whitman's major poems and essays. Whitman viewed American English as the most expressive, poetic language that ever existed, and he used his studies of historical linguistics to corroborate that view. Part 1 explicates the theory of language that Whitman developed in his linguistic notebooks, unpublished manuscripts, fugitive essays, and two chapters of the popular book Rambles Among Words. The diction and syntax of the 1855–1856 editions of Leaves of Grass are analyzed to show how Whitman's overwhelming interest in language theories resulted in the "language experiment" of the poems. Part 2 examines the ways in which Whitman's view of language as an expression of the constantly evolving spirit of America subtly shifted to a more cumulative, backward-looking vision of linguistic and spiritual change. Analysis of the diction, syntax, and organization of the last four editions of Leaves of Grass reveals how this shift in vision affected the style of Whitman's poetry and prose from 1860 to 1892. Whitman's groundbreaking poetic style, the author concludes, was a direct consequence of his view of language and the human spirit as dynamic, progressivist, and actively changing within a temporal world. Conversely, Whitman's experiments in both prose and poetry helped confirm his view of linguistic and spiritual evolution.
Author: James Perrin Warren
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271073020
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 207
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Book Description
Combining intellectual history with literary analysis, this study of Whitman's language experiment from 1855 to 1892 offers a refreshing new look at his theory of language especially the English language in America—as an expression of a "national spirit" and relates that theory to the language and style of Whitman's major poems and essays. Whitman viewed American English as the most expressive, poetic language that ever existed, and he used his studies of historical linguistics to corroborate that view. Part 1 explicates the theory of language that Whitman developed in his linguistic notebooks, unpublished manuscripts, fugitive essays, and two chapters of the popular book Rambles Among Words. The diction and syntax of the 1855–1856 editions of Leaves of Grass are analyzed to show how Whitman's overwhelming interest in language theories resulted in the "language experiment" of the poems. Part 2 examines the ways in which Whitman's view of language as an expression of the constantly evolving spirit of America subtly shifted to a more cumulative, backward-looking vision of linguistic and spiritual change. Analysis of the diction, syntax, and organization of the last four editions of Leaves of Grass reveals how this shift in vision affected the style of Whitman's poetry and prose from 1860 to 1892. Whitman's groundbreaking poetic style, the author concludes, was a direct consequence of his view of language and the human spirit as dynamic, progressivist, and actively changing within a temporal world. Conversely, Whitman's experiments in both prose and poetry helped confirm his view of linguistic and spiritual evolution.
Author: Andrew Lawson
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587296705
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 187
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Book Description
By reconsidering Whitman not as the proletarian voice of American diversity but as a historically specific poet with roots in the antebellum lower middle class, Andrew Lawson in Walt Whitman and the Class Struggle defines the tensions and ambiguities about culture, class, and politics that underlie his poetry.Drawing on a wealth of primary sources from across the range of antebellum print culture, Lawson uses close readings of Leaves of Grass to reveal Whitman as an artisan and an autodidact ambivalently balanced between his sense of the injustice of class privilege and his desire for distinction. Consciously drawing upon the languages of both the elite culture above him and the vernacular culture below him, Whitman constructed a kind of middle linguistic register that attempted to filter these conflicting strata and defuse their tensions: “You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, / You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.” By exploring Whitman's internal struggle with the contradictions and tensions of his class identity, Lawson locates the source of his poetic innovation. By revealing a class-conscious and conflicted Whitman, he realigns our understanding of the poet's political identity and distinctive use of language and thus valuably alters our perspective on his poetry.
Author: M. Jimmie Killingsworth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139462288
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 123
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Book 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.
Author: Ed Folsom
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521585729
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
Moving through Whitman's career four times from four different perspectives, this 1994 book investigates several major American cultural developments that occurred during Whitman's lifetime, the development of American dictionaries, the growth of baseball, the evolution of American Indian policy: the development of photography became essential components of Whitman's innovative poetics. Resisting the usual critical temptation to present a totalised, one-dimensional Whitman, this study views him instead as multiple and contradictory, a gatherer of discordant tones and clashing approaches from a variety of surprising cultural arenas. In such cultural activities, Whitman found not his poetic subject so much as his poetic tools and techniques. These cultural actions taught him how to make native representations.
Author: M. Jimmie Killingsworth
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587295164
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient, It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions, It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses, It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor, It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops, It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last. —Walt Whitman, from “This Compost” How did Whitman use language to figure out his relationship to the earth, and how can we interpret his language to reconstruct the interplay between the poet and his sociopolitical and environmental world? In this first book-length study of Whitman’s poetry from an ecocritical perspective, Jimmie Killingsworth takes ecocriticism one step further into ecopoetics to reconsider both Whitman’s language in light of an ecological understanding of the world and the world through a close study of Whitman’s language. Killingsworth contends that Whitman’s poetry embodies the kinds of conflicted experience and language that continually crop up in the discourse of political ecology and that an ecopoetic perspective can explicate Whitman’s feelings about his aging body, his war-torn nation, and the increasing stress on the American environment both inside and outside the urban world. He begins with a close reading of “This Compost”—Whitman’s greatest contribution to the literature of ecology,” from the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. He then explores personification and nature as object, as resource, and as spirit and examines manifest destiny and the globalizing impulse behind Leaves of Grass, then moves the other way, toward Whitman’s regional, even local appeal—demonstrating that he remained an island poet even as he became America’s first urban poet. After considering Whitman as an urbanizing poet, he shows how, in his final writings, Whitman tried to renew his earlier connection to nature. Walt Whitman and the Earth reveals Whitman as a powerfully creative experimental poet and a representative figure in American culture whose struggles and impulses previewed our lives today.
Author: John E. Seery
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 081312655X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
The works of Walt Whitman have been described as masculine, feminine, postcolonial, homoerotic, urban, organic, unique, and democratic, yet arguments about the extent to which Whitman could or should be considered a political poet have yet to be fully confronted. Some scholars disregard Whitman's understanding of democracy, insisting on separating his personal works from his political works. A Political Companion to Walt Whitman is the first full-length exploration of Whitman's works through the lens of political theory. Editor John E. Seery and a collection of prominent theorists and philosophers uncover the political awareness of Whitman's poetry and prose, analyzing his faith in the potential of individuals, his call for a revolution in literature and political culture, and his belief in the possibility of combining heroic individualism with democratic justice. A Political Companion to Walt Whitman reaches beyond literature into political theory, revealing the ideology behind Whitman's call for the emergence of American poets of democracy.
Author: Frank D. Casale
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438127685
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Offers advice on writing essays about the poetry of Walt Whitman and lists sample topics.
Author: John E. Schwiebert
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476646090
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
Walt Whitman created, in various editions of Leaves of Grass, what is arguably the most influential book of poems anywhere in the past 200 years. Whitman absorbed the world, transmuting it into poems that address a spectrum of topics--from democracy and religion to sexuality, gender, class, and identity. He exuberantly incarnated his epoch at the same time as he invoked "you"-- readers and "poets to come"--to join in a "poetry of the future." The first A to Z Whitman reference to incorporate 21st century scholarship, this work is ideal for readers who want a concise introduction to the major poems and prose and to the people, places, and topics central to his life. Each of the book's 142 entries is followed by cross-references to related entries and suggestions for further reading. Also included are a brief biography, a chronology of Whitman's life and major works, and a bibliography of some 300 primary and secondary sources on this most timeless and contemporary of poets.
Author: Melanie Maria Lörke
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3050064536
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
Grenzen, ihre Überschreitung, ihre Auflösung und ihre Wiederherstellung sind ein bisher nicht systematisch erforschtes Schlüsselkonzept für das Verständnis romantischer Literatur. Diese semiotisch-komparatistische Grundsatzstudie analysiert über drei Kulturräume hinweg vergleichend eine Vielfalt heterogener literarischer Entgrenzungsphänomene in der Romantik und entwickelt auf der Basis der romantischen Zeichentheorie ein Modell für die Analyse transepochaler Entgrenzungsphänomene. Dabei geht sie über bekannte Konzepte des paradoxen Subjekts hinaus, indem Entgrenzung als Interdependenz von Subjekt, Raum und Zeichen umfassend in detaillierten Lektüren literarischer Texte aus Deutschland, den USA und Großbritannien sowie in theoretischen Exkursen untersucht wird - von Novalis und Coleridge über Melville bis hin zu Deleuze und Guattari. Die Arbeit ist somit nicht nur ein Beitrag zur Romantikforschung, sondern lotet auch die methodologischen Möglichkeiten derselben neu aus. Die Studie wurde 2012 mit dem von der Ernst-Reuter-Gesellschaft der Freunde, Förderer und Ehemaligen der Freien Universität Berlin e.V. gestifteten Ernst-Reuter-Preis als herausragende und zukunftsweisende Promotionsarbeit ausgezeichnet. Boundaries constitute a key concept in Romanticism: their transgression, their elimination, but also their reconstruction. By analyzing the triad of sign, subject, and space, this study provides a comprehensive analysis of boundaries in German, English, and American Romanticism. Its trans-epochal approach reveals a shared dynamic of a multiplicity of heterogeneous boundary phenomena ranging from the late 18th century to postmodern Romantic texts and constructs a model for the examination of limits: a theory of a-limitation. The known concept of the transgressive Romantic subject is integrated into this triadic model whose primordial site of a-limitation, however, is the semiotics of Romanticism. With a creative theoretical design that allows the reader to survey readings of individual texts as well as broader theoretical frameworks, "Liminal Semiotics" offers a new perspective on a variety of literary texts and theories ranging from Novalis and Coleridge to Melville and finally to Deleuze and Guattari. The thesis was awarded the Ernst-Reuter-Prize 2012 for outstanding dissertations at Freie Universität Berlin.
