Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-century America

by Wolosky, Shira

• ISBN13: 9780230104310
• ISBN10: 0230104312
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-09-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century Americaexplores 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.

Author Biography

Shira Wolosky is Professor in the Departments of English and American Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Table of Contents

Preface: Poetics, Culture, Rhetoric	p. ix
Modest Claims	p. 1
Emily Dickinson and American Identity	p. 15
Public and Private: Double Standards	p. 31
Genteel Rhetoric, North and South	p. 45
Edgar Allan Poe: Metaphysical Rupture and the Sign of Woman	p. 67
Claiming the Bible: Slave Spirituals and African-American Typology	p. 83
Women's Bibles	p. 97
Fragmented Rhetoric in Battle-Pieces	p. 113
Plural Identities and Local Color	p. 125
Emma Lazarus' American-Jewish Prophetics	p. 139
Paul Laurence Dunbar's Crossing Languages	p. 153
Harvard Formalism	p. 163
Walt Whitman's Republic of Letters	p. 175
Postscript: Charting American Trends: Stephen Crane	p. 201
Notes	p. 211
Sources and Abbreviations	p. 247
Index	p. 251
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