Kenneth M. Price

Ed Folsom

Susan Belasco

This comprehensive volume celebrates the 150th anniversary of the 1855 edition of Walt Whitman?s Leaves of Grass with twenty essays by preeminent scholars representing a variety of critical perspectives that focus exclusively on the original edition. Once regarded as primarily a collector?s item, this edition is now viewed as the poet?s most bold and compelling articulation of the possibilities of American democracy. ø The essays weave a rich tapestry of the most current, innovative criticism on this foundational book of American poetry. The contributors treat Whitman?s poetry, his biography, his politics, his reception in the United States and abroad, race and ethnic issues, nineteenth-century America, and even the complex typographical history of the first edition of Leaves of Grass. The volume also includes a tribute from the renowned poet Galway Kinnell.

The Sesquicentennial Essays

Leaves of Grass

Gay Wilson Allen

Celebrating the various ethnic traditions that melded to create what we now call American literature, Whitman did his best to encourage an international reaction to his work. But even he would have been startled by the multitude of ways in which his call has been answered. By tracking this wholehearted international response and reconceptualizing American literature, Walt Whitman and the World demonstrates how various cultures have appropriated an American writer who ceases to sound quite so narrowly American when he is read into other cultures' traditions.

Walt Whitman and the World

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 growing international spirit of American studies, the essays in Whitman East and West developed out of a landmark conference in Beijing, the first major conference in China to focus on an American poet. Scholars from Asia, Europe, and North America set out to track the ways in which Whitman's poetry has become part of China's cultural landscape as well as the literary landscapes of other countries. By describing his assimilation into other cultures and his resulting transformation into a hybrid poet, these essayists celebrate Whitman's multiple manifestations in other languages and contexts.

New Contexts for Reading Walt Whitman

Whitman East and West

This introductory guide to Walt Whitman weaves together thewriter’s life with an examination of his works. · An innovative introductory guide to Walt Whitman. · Weaves together the writer’s life with anexamination of his works. · Focuses especially on Whitman’s evolvingmasterpiece Leaves of Grass. · Examines the material conditions and products ofWhitman’s “scripted life”, including his originalmanuscripts. · Investigates Whitman’s “life in print”– his belief that he could literally embody himself in hisbooks. · Linked to a large electronic archive of Whitman’swork at www.whitmanarchive.org

Ed Folsom

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