Description
Book SynopsisThe Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America illuminates the connections between poems and critical ideas about poetic genres, and tracks the emergence and disappearance of poems and poets in American culture by examining how people encountered and made sense of poetry.
Trade Review"
The Social Lives of Poems situates a lucid and forceful argument around an array of valuable primary sources. Cohen's thorough engagement with recent scholarship on the ballad, nineteenth-century reform movements, and performance studies only highlights the innovations of his own research and the impressive contribution his wide-ranging and rigorous study makes to the study of American literary culture and the value of poems never read or now forgotten." *
Early American Literature *
"A truly magisterial work, brimming with extraordinary original research. The book is rich, precise, and emphatically various in details, but not lost in them." * Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Amherst College *
"Richly grounded in archival research,
The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America works outward from individual cases to make broadly important, powerful, and persuasive claims about the central role of poetry in the formation of a nineteenth-century racial and national imaginary." * Eliza Richards, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill *
Table of ContentsIntroduction. How to Read a Nineteenth-Century Poem
Chapter 1. Balladmongering and Social Life
Chapter 2. The Poetics of Reform
Chapter 3. Contraband Songs
Chapter 4. Old Ballads and New Histories
Chapter 5. The Reconstruction of American Poetry
Chapter 6. The Minstrels' Trail
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
