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Erkkila's aim is to repair the split between the private and the public, the personal and the political and the poet and the history that has governed the analysis and evaluation of Whitman and his work in the past.
Over the years, some readers have found Edgar Allen Poe to be virulently racist. This volume revisits the race issue and re-examines what it means to speak of an author and his work as racist, and where the critic's responsibility lies.
Contains seventeen essays by pre-eminent scholars representing a variety of critical perspectives that focus on Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass". This book features contributors who treat Whitman's poetry, his biography, his politics, his reception in the United States and abroad, race and ethnic issues, and nineteenth-century America.
In Whitman East and West, fifteen prominent scholars track the surprising ways in which Whitman's poetry and prose continue to be meaningful at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Covering a broad range of issues—from ecology to children's literature, gay identity to China's May 4th Movement, nineteenth-century New York politics to the emerging field of normality studies, Mao Zedong to American film—each original essay opens a previously unexplored field of study, and each yields new insights by demonstrating how emerging methodologies and approaches intersect with and illuminate Whitman's ideas about democracy, sexuality, America, and the importance of literature. Confirming the ...
The Whitman Revolution brings together a rich collection of Betsy Erkkila’s phenomenally influential essays that have been published over the years, along with two powerful new essays. Erkkila offers a moving account of the inseparable mix of the spiritual-sexual-political in Whitman and the absolute centrality of male-male connection to his work and thinking. Her work has been at the forefront of scholarship positing that Whitman’s songs are songs not only of workers and occupations but of sex and the body, homoeroticism, and liberation. What is more, Erkkila’s writing demonstrates that this sexuality and communal impulse is central to Whitman’s revolutionary poetry and his concepti...
An obsessively private writer, Emily Dickinson almost never submitted poems for publication, which she deemed "the Auction / Of the Mind". Yet over a century of criticism has established what readers of various sensibilities describe as a shockingly intimate relation between text and audience, making the question of whom the poems address a crucial element in interpreting them. This volume of essays is the first book exclusively focused on Dickinson's relation to audience - from the relatively few persons who received many of the poems to that vast, unseen, yet somehow specific "other" that any literary work addresses. Dickinson's writings were influenced by her ambivalent attitude toward th...
A provocative new reading of the great American avant-garde arist Marsden Hartley's late work.
In this series of essays Betsy Erkkila considers the historical and psychological dramas of blood—as marker of violence, race, sex, kinship—that have stood near the center of American literature, culture, and politics since the eighteenth century.
According to Carol Rigolot, reading the work of Nobel Prize-winning poet Saint-John Perse (1887-1975) is not unlike eavesdropping on a telephone conversation in which only one side is audible. His poems are antiphonal, and even polyphonic, works where int
'Useful Objects' examines the cultural history of nineteenth-century American museums through the eyes of writers, visitors, and collectors. Throughout this period, museums gradually transformed from encyclopedic cabinets to more specialized public institutions. These changes prompted wider debates about how museums determine what objects to select, preserve, and display-and who gets to decide. Drawing on a wide range of archival materials and accounts in fiction, guidebooks, and periodicals, this text shows how the challenges facing nineteenth-century museums continue to resonate in debates about their role in American culture today.