The Cambridge History of American Literature

by Edited by Sacvan Bercovitch

• ISBN13: 9780521301084
• ISBN10: 0521301084
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-12-06
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This is the first complete narrative history of nineteenth-century American poetry. Barbara Packer explores the neoclassical and satiric forms mastered by the early Federalist poets; the creative reaches of once-celebrated, and still compelling, poets like Longfellow and Whittier; the distinctive lyric forms developed by Emerson and the Transcendentalists. Shira Wolosky provides a new perspective on the achievement of female poets of the period, as well as a close appreciation of African-American poets, including the collective folk authors of the Negro spirituals. She also illuminates the major works of the period, from Poe through Melville and Crane, to Whitman and Dickinson. The authors of this volume discuss this extraordinary literary achievement both in formal terms and in its sustained engagement with changing social and cultural conditions. In doing so they recover and elucidate American poetry of the nineteenth century for our twenty-first century pleasure, profit, and renewed study.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	viii
Introduction	1	(10)
AMERICAN VERSE TRADITIONS, 1800-1855
Barbara Packer
Preface: reverence and ambition	11	(6)
1. Neoclassicism: comic and satiric verse	17	(24)
2. Early narrative and lyric	41	(46)
3. Transcendentalism	87	(50)
4. John Greenleaf Whittier	137	(10)
POETRY AND PUBLIC DISCOURSE, 1820-1910
Shira Wolosky
Preface: the claims of rhetoric	147	(8)
1. Modest claims	155	(45)
2. Claiming the Bible	200	(48)
3. Poetic languages	248	(76)
4. Plural identities	324	(38)
5. Walt Whitman: the office of the poet	362	(65)
6. Emily Dickinson: the violence of the imagination	427
Chronology. 1800-1910
Neal Dolan	481	(53)
Bibliography	534	(6)
Index	540