Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America explores 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.

Autorentext
Shira Wolosky isProfessor in the Departments of English and American Studies atThe Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Inhalt
Preface: The Claims of Rhetoric PART I: Modest Claims Writing Etiquette Emily Dickinson: Crises of American Identity Public and Private: Reconsidered PART II: Claiming the Bible Slave Spirituals and Black Typology Women's Bibles Herman Melville: Fractured Rhetoric in Battle-Pieces PART III: Poetic Languages Genteel Poets: Rhetoric North and South Edgar Allan Poe: Repetition, Women, and Signs Stephen Crane: American Economies Santayana and Harvard Formalism PART IV: Plural Identities Local-Color Poetry Crossing Languages in Paul Laurence Dunbar Emma Lazarus: An American-Jewish Typology Walt Whitman's Republic of Letters * Postscript: Charting American Trends