Reconsidering Longfellow

Christoph Irmscher, Robert Arbour

• Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781611476743
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Reconsidering Longfellow is the first collection of scholarly essays in several decades devoted entirely to the work and afterlife of the most popular and widely read writer in American literature. The essays, written by a new generation of Longfellow scholars, cover the entire range of Longfellow's work, from the early poetry to the wildly successful epics of his middle period (Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha) to his Chaucerian collection of stories published after the Civil War, Tales of a Wayside Inn. Separate contributions discuss Longfellow's financial dealings, his preoccupation with his children, and his interest in the visual arts, as well as the tremendous role his poetry did and will once again play in American literature classrooms in the U.S. All essays were written specifically for the volume. Many of them rely on unpublished archival sources from the Longfellow collections at the Longfellow House-George Washington National Historic Site and at Houghton Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Quotations
• Introduction
• Longfellow’s Conversations: Weltliteratur as Aesthetic in the Early Poetry
• Feeling, Controlling, and Transcending: The Negotiation of Sentiment in Longfellow, Poe, and Whitman
• “A Love of Heaven and Virtue”: Why Longfellow Sentimentalizes Death
• The Song of Hiawatha and the Ruins of American Literature
• The Sounds of Narrative in Longfellow’s Evangeline
• Westwärts! Westwärts!
• The Cultural Career of Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride”
• Figures Other Than Figures of Speech: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Pursuit of Financial Success
• “Not from the Grand Old Masters”: The Art of Henry and Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow
• Conversing with Longfellow: Democratizing the American Literature Curriculum
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Note on Contributors