Description
Book SynopsisThe nineteenth century is often viewed as a golden age of American literature, a historical moment when national identity was emergent and ideals such as freedom, democracy, and individual agency were promising, even if belied in reality by violence and hypocrisy. The writers of this “American Renaissance”—Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Emerson, and Dickinson, among many others—produced a body of work that has been both celebrated and contested by following generations.
As the twenty-first century unfolds in a United States characterized by deep divisions, diminished democracy, and dramatic transformation of identities, the co-editors of this singular book approached a dozen North American poets, asking them to engage with texts by their predecessors in a manner that avoids both aloofness from the past and too-easy elegy. The resulting essays dwell provocatively on the border between the lyrical and the scholarly, casting fresh critical light on the golden age of American literature and exploring a handful of texts not commonly included in its canon.
A polyvocal collection that reflects the complexity of the cross-temporal encounter it enacts, 21 19 offers a re-reading of the “American Renaissance” and new possibilities for imaginative critical practice today.
Trade Review"[These essays] plumb the traditional American canon—and significant texts on its periphery—to contend with the questions of national ethos and identity that resound today. Editors Kristen Case and Alexandra Manglis suggest the ways poetry might be both agitator and balm in times of social crisis, as thirteen poets write about topics such as Poe and race, gun violence, and the Black pastoral."
—Poets & Writers "Displaying a sophisticated sense of poetics as well as a good grasp of history and its implications for the present moment . . . [the editors] have done a remarkable job of bringing together such a challenging collection."
—Harvard ReviewTable of ContentsContents Foreword, Approximity (in the life, her attempt to bring the life of her mother close
Fred Moten
Introduction, Unsettling Proximities
Kristen Case and Alexandra Manglis
Thinking as Burial Practice: Exhuming a Poetic Epistemology in Thoreau, Dickinson, and Emerson
Dan Beachy-Quick
Feeling the Riot: Fugitivity, Lyric, and Enduring Failure
José Felipe Alvergue
Essay in Fragments, a Pile of Limbs: Walt Whitman’s Body in the Book
Stefania Heim
Citation in the Wake of Melville
Joan Naviyuk Kane
Touching the Horror: Poe, Race, and Gun Violence
Karen Weiser
Homage to Bayard Taylor
Benjamin Friedlander
Revising The Waste Land: Black Antipastoral & The End of the World
Joshua Bennett
Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1859–1937: Night Over Night
Cole Swensen
Nights and Lights in Nineteenth Century American Poetics
Cecily Parks
The Earth Is Full of Men
Brian Teare
Making Black Cake in Combustible Spaces
M. NourbeSe Philip
“The Tinge Awakes”: Reading Whitman and Others in Trouble
Leila Wilson
Acknowledgments
Works Cited
Illustration Credits
Editors
Contributors
