Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America

S. Wolosky

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780230104310
• eBook ISBN: 9780230113008
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America explores nineteenth-century poetry as it addresses and engages in the major concerns of American cultural life. Focusing on gender, biblical politics, Revolutionary discourses and racial, sectional, and religious identities, this book reveals how these issues contended and negotiated with each other in the shaping of a pluralist democratic polity. Nineteenth-century American poetry, far from being the self-reflective art object of twentieth-century aesthetic theory, offered a rhetorical arena in which civic, economic, and religious trends intersected with each other in mutual definition and investigation. With a deft hand, Shira Wolosky demonstrates the ways in which poetry was a core impulse in the formation of American identity and cultural definition.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Preface: Poetics, Culture, Rhetoric
• 1 Modest Claims
• 2 Emily Dickinson and American Identity
• 3 Public and Private: Double Standards
• 4 Genteel Rhetoric, North and South
• 5 Edgar Allan Poe: Metaphysical Rupture and the Sign of Woman
• 6 Claiming the Bible: Slave Spirituals and African-American Typology
• 7 Women’s Bibles
• 8 Fragmented Rhetoric in Battle-Pieces
• 9 Plural Identities and Local Color
• 10 Emma Lazarus’ American-Jewish Prophetics
• 11 Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Crossing Languages
• 12 Harvard Formalism
• 13 Walt Whitman’s Republic of Letters
• Postscript: Charting American Trends: Stephen Crane
• Notes
• Sources and Abbreviations
• Index