Poetry and public discourse in nineteenth-century America
[Book]
Shira Wolosky.
New York
Palgrave Macmillan
2010
(xii, 254 p.).
Nineteenth-century major lives and letters
Includes index.
Preface: The Claims of Rhetoric * PART I: Modest Claims * Writing Etiquette * Emily Dickinson: Crises of American Identity * Public and Private: Reconsidered * PART II: Claiming the Bible * Slave Spirituals and Black Typology * Women's Bibles * Herman Melville: Fractured Rhetoric in Battle-Pieces * PART III: Poetic Languages * Genteel Poets: Rhetoric North and South * Edgar Allan Poe: Repetition, Women, and Signs * Stephen Crane: American Economies * Santayana and Harvard Formalism * PART IV: Plural Identities * Local-Color Poetry * Crossing Languages in Paul Laurence Dunbar * Emma Lazarus: An American-Jewish Typology * Walt Whitman's Republic of Letters * Postscript: Charting American Trends
Arguing against the perception of poetry as an elite discourse, Shira Wolosky explores the ways that Dickinson, Whitman, Melville, and others shaped nineteenth-century American cultural debate.
American poetry -- History and criticism -- 19th century.
Literature and society -- United States -- History -- 19th century.
National characteristics, American, in literature.