Search results for ""Author Walt Whitman"

The essential poems of Emily Dickinson selected and introduced by Joyce Carol Oates“Between them, our great visionary poets of the American nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, have come to represent the extreme, idiosyncratic poles of the American psyche. . . .Dickinson never shied away from the great subjects of human suffering, loss, death, even madness, but her perspective was intensely private; like Rainer Maria Rilke and Gerard Manley Hopkins, she is the great poet of inwardness, of the indefinable region of the soul in which we are, in a sense, all alone.” —from the introduction by Joyce Carol Oates

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Conceived as an archive of wisdom written by a disabled man for his children, You May Not Take the Sad and Angry Consolations gives voice to the experience of living in an ableist society: "Why does it hurt when emotion spills out of a body? How does emotion spell ‘body’? What does it mean to be good? Why is the surplus of beauty everywhere? What is the password?" Weaving together reflections on fatherhood, Walt Whitman’s place in American history, art, and the lingering effects of past trauma, these ringing and raw poems theorize on the concept of shame, its intended purpose, and its effects for and on disabled body-minds.

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Ten long poems that try to do for America what Shakespeare did for England: turn history and legend into poetry.American Cycle, a sequence of long poems inspired by our folklore and past, was written over forty-seven years. Its themes are love, local mythology, history, justice, memory, accomplishment, time. "The books are extraordinary, sustained explosions of authentic American language and energy. Each is entirely different from the others in style, voice, form and narrative content; each so rich in imagery and nuance and texture and event and so finely crafted. . . " —Paul Williams, author of Bob Dylan: Performing Artist. Its styles are connected to our speech: Spanish words loaned from Old California, rough colloquialisms in Paul Bunyan, the power of African-American vernacular English in John Henry, bare oratory in Chief Joseph, old west phrases in Wyatt Earp, circus ballyhoo in P. T. Barnum, aviation jargon in Amelia Earhart, backwoods dialect in Blue Ridge. As Walt Whitman says, "I hear America singing, the varied carols. . .”

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Throughout his life, Walt Whitman continually revised and re-released Leaves of Grass. He added and deleted words, emended lines, divided poems, dropped and created titles, and shifted the order of poems. Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems includes all the variants that Whitman ever published, from the collection’s first appearance in 1855 through the posthumous “Old Age Echoes” annex printed in 1897. Each edition was unique, with its own character and emphasis, and the Textual Variorum enables scholars to follow the development of both the individual poems and the work as a whole. Volume I contains introductory material, including a chronology of the poems and a summary of all the editions and annexes, along with the poems from 1855 and 1856. Volume II includes the poems from 1860 through 1867, including the first appearance of “When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom’d” and “O Captain! my Captain!” Volume III features the poems 1870–1891, plus the “Old Ages Annex” and an index to the three-volume set.

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Magnificent Homespun Brown is an exploration of the natural world and family bonds through the eyes of young, mixed raced heroines—a living, breathing, dazzlingly multi-faceted, exuberant masterpiece, firmly grounded in a sense of self-worth and belonging. This is a story—a poem, a song, a celebration—­about feeling at home in one’s own beloved skin. If Walt Whitman were reborn as a young woman of colour, this is the book he might write. With vivid illustrations by Kaylani Juanita, Samara Cole Doyon sings a carol for the plenitude that surrounds us and the self each of us is meant to inhabit.

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"Alphabetic dismantling, syntactic play, essaying words backwards and 4words (as she might say), Christakos manifests forensic clarity and telegraphic fortitude in this unsettling work."--Rachel Blau DuPlessis Revelling in the value of social polyphony from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," Multitudes looks at its contemporary theatres of Facebook and Twitter, post-riot police surveillance, protest culture and poetry itself. With wit, perceptiveness and her trademark linguistic sonar, Margaret Christakos keenly examines intimacies and banishments, as well as intergenerational grief, self-display and social hope.

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Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931) was a Lebanese American writer, poet and artist. He is most famous for his great work, The Prophet – one of the bestselling books of all time. The Prophet, a collection of 26 prose poetry fables, is thematically similar to the theological musings of William Blake, Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, while also being influenced by traditional Arabic writing and modern surrealism.Since its publication in 1923, The Prophet has been translated into more than 100 languages and has never gone out of print. Reproduced for our cover is one of Gibran’s handwritten English drafts of the work, currently held at Princeton University Library’s Special Collections, Manuscripts Division.

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Many tensions are at work in the playfully unconstrained poems of Stanley Moss: ordinary and mythical lives, the political and the personal, high art and low comedy intermingle, achieving an effect that is often surreal and always striking. Here, God and Death are not matters for detached speculation but constant and vivid presences, whether centre-stage or waiting in the wings. An engagement with history is brought to bear on legend and on current affairs: a poem addressing 9/11 summons up the figure of Walt Whitman, whose exuberance and resolute faith in humanity Moss echoes throughout the book. Serious and optimistic, light and dark, "Songs of Imperfection" is an uplifting and celebratory book.

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“Highly recommended reading for those hungry for surprise” (A.J. Jacobs, New York Times bestselling author)—a rollicking collection of personal stories and essays on relationships, technology, and contemporary society from the news editor at Funny or Die and former artistic director at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater.This hilarious collection of essays spans a wide variety of topics. There’s the open letter to Charles Manson, a brave archeologist’s journey into a suburban man cave, and a long overdue, sternly worded letter from Leif Erikson to Christopher Columbus. Walt Whitman even teaches a spin class. Nate Dern’s razor-sharp eye examines modern society and technology, man buns, dating apps, and juicing crazes. Anyone who’s ever scrunched their eyes at WiFi Terms & Conditions, listened to the reasons that led a vegetarian to give up meat, or looked on in horror at the evolving audacity of reality TV will appreciate Dern’s wicked and funny take on modern life. Not Quite a Genius is fun, and funny, “a breath of fresh air that you can eat up bit by bit or all at once” (Abbi Jacobson, cocreator and star of Broad City).

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Tormented by his religious family and the broader conservative community of Pawley's Island, South Carolina, fourteen-year-old Josh struggles with the pressure to conform to their puritanical standards. As he embarks upon his high school years, Josh meets a supportive cast of eccentric small-town characters, falls in love with his classmate, becomes obsessed with David Bowie, and fumbles in his attempts to make his own thongs. But it's when his elderly neighbor gives him a copy of Walt Whitman's Song of Myself that he begins to understand his own sexuality. Our Bodies Electric is a coming-of-age story that celebrates the exuberance of youth, the individual quest for sexual identity, and the joy of finding connections in the most unexpected of places.

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Winner of the 2020 Hopper Poetry Prize What would you get if a Taoist monk sat down with Wendell Berry, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Sappho, and G.M. Hopkins to write sonnets that banish conventions of form, structure, & meter, while creating new parameters within which to start, stop, surge, yield, twist, turn, open, close. These poems beg to be spoken aloud; each finds a singular cadence, tension, perspective, to bring to the natural world fresh and sometimes unusual voices (a poem in the voice of a praying mantis? …vulture? …whippoorwill?) Bit by bit, they work from the observed and/or fantasized, to get to the internal, the personal, to a celebratory grief.

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It has been the privilege of a lifetime to have walked the battlefields of the American Civil War, where Timothy O'Sullivan walked, and where he exposed the photographic plates that render him as a photographer of high distinction. His photographs now populate a civil war media space, mostly without due credit: The name Timothy O'Sullivan is now largely familiar only to enthusiasts and historians. I hope that this book will span some of this distance, and carry him further forward in public understanding. If so, it will have served its purpose. The Walt Whitman valediction as accorded to Alexander Gardner, applies, equally, to Timothy O'Sullivan - “saw farther than his camera”. This book is dedicated to a photographer who does not deserve to be such a fragile whisper on the sorrow of the American Civil War.

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Bram Stoker, despite having a name nearly as famous as Count Dracula, has remained an enigma. David J. Skal, in a psychological and cultural portrait, exhumes the inner world and strange genius of the writer who conjured an undying cultural icon. Stoker was inexplicably paralysed as a boy and his story unfolds against a backdrop of Victorian medical mysteries and horrors: fever, opium abuse, bloodletting, quack cures and the obsession with “bad blood” that inform every page of Dracula. Stoker’s ambiguous sexuality is explored through his acquaintance with Oscar Wilde, who emerges as Stoker’s repressed shadow self—a doppelgänger worthy of a Gothic novel. The psychosexual dimensions of Stoker’s correspondence with Walt Whitman, his punishing work ethic and his adoration of the actor Henry Irving are examined in scholarly detail.

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Dads are hard to buy for. Books are easy gifts. A book dad can laugh at with mom and the kids? Solid gold. Let's be honest: Most gifts for dad usually end up being a golf club or a tie. But what about the dad in desperate need of a laugh, who is looking for reassurance he's not the only father trying to figure it all out? Stark Raving Dad is a collection of 75 hilarious poems -- no claims to be Walt Whitman here -- that capture the hapless anxiety of dads worldwide. Over the years, Sanderson Dean has turned all his fatherly angst into a collection of poetry, accompanied by crudely-drawn art created by his children. From surviving road trips to being puked on, Dean covers many of the rarely talked about adventures that make the journey of parenthood so exciting.

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A stunning anthology of poetry to create calm and peacefulness. The poems are arranged around themes of meditation, friendship, gratitude, prayers and blessings, stillness and consolation. Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, pocket-sized classics with ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition features a preface by Ana Sampson. There are poems by Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare, W. B. Yeats, Katherine Mansfield, George Herbert, William Wordsworth, Anne Brontë, Khalil Gibran, Rumi, Walt Whitman and many more. There are also uplifting prayers and blessings from around the world. Each inspiring verse flows effortlessly into the next in this anthology of classic poetry, Poems for Stillness.

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HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars… First published in 1855, and edited, revised and expanded over thirty years, ‘Leaves of Grass’ has become one of the most celebrated poetry collections in the history of American literature. A master of free verse, Walt Whitman captures the true spirit of his homeland and its people through his poetry. He explores a wide range of themes, encompassing American identity and cultural values, democracy, nature and the mysteries of the human spirit. Featuring the poems of the original 1855 edition, ‘Leaves of Grass’ remains an influential work within the American literary tradition, studied and treasured around the world.

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Yukichi Fukuzawa rose from low samurai origins to become one of the finest intellectuals and social thinkers of modern Japan. Through his best-selling works, he helped transform an isolated feudal nation into a full-fledged international force. In Outline of a Theory of Civilization, the author's most sustained philosophical text, Fukuzawa translates and adapts a range of Western works for a Japanese audience, establishing the social, cultural, and political avenues through which Japan could connect with other countries. Echoing the ideas of Western contemporaries such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, Fukuzawa encouraged a grassroots elevation of the individual and national spirit, as well as free initiative in the private domain. Fukuzawa's bold project articulated thoughts that, for him, bolstered the material evidence of Western civilization. He argued that the essential difference separating Western countries from Japan and Asia was the extent to which citizens acted like free and responsible individuals. This careful new translation, accompanied by a comprehensive critical introduction, highlights the truly transnational aspects of Outline of a Theory of Civilization and its status as a foundational text of modern Japanese civilization. Approaching Fukuzawa's progressive thought with a fresh eye, these scholars elucidate the monumental and peerless quality of his work.

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As Malcolm Cowley says in his introduction, the first edition of Leaves of Grass 'might be called the buried masterpiece of American writing', for it exhibits 'Whitman at his best, Whitman at his freshest in vision and boldest in language, Whitman transformed by a new experience.' Mr Cowley has taken the first edition from its narrow circulation among scholars, faithfully edited it, added his own introduction and Whitman's original introduction (which never appeared in any other edition during Whitman's life), and returned it to the common readership to whom the great poet really speaks.

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In Heidegger’s Being: The Shimmering Unfolding, the eminent Heidegger scholar Richard Capobianco draws on many new texts and sources to highlight in fresh ways the beauty and spiritual resonance of Martin Heidegger’s thinking about Being. As in his earlier books, Capobianco offers a meditative path through Heidegger’s thought. He illuminates major motifs that are overlooked or set aside by most contemporary readings of Heidegger, amplifying these motifs in an original, heartfelt, and eloquent way. The book also offers a series of reflections that bring Heidegger’s thinking into close proximity to other thinkers and poets, including Alfred North Whitehead, C.G. Jung, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, and Rumi. Heidegger’s Being: The Shimmering Unfolding is intended not only for dedicated students of Heidegger’s work but also for engaged general readers who wish to come to a deeper appreciation of his distinctive vision of Being.

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Emily Skaja’s debut collection is a fiery, hypnotic book that confronts the dark questions and menacing silences around gender, sexuality, and violence. Brute arises, brave and furious, from the dissolution of a relationship, showing how such endings necessitate self-discovery and reinvention. The speaker of these poems is a sorceress, a bride, a warrior, a lover, both object and agent, ricocheting among ways of knowing and being known. Each incarnation squares itself up against ideas of feminine virtue and sin, strength and vulnerability, love and rage, as it closes in on a hard-won freedom. Brute is absolutely sure of its capacity to insist not only on the truth of what it says but on the truth of its right to say it. “What am I supposed to say: I’m free?” the first poem asks. The rest of the poems emphatically discover new ways to answer. This is a timely winner of the Walt Whitman Award, and an introduction to an unforgettable voice.

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In Toward Camden, Mercy Romero writes about the relationships that make and sustain the largely African American and Puerto Rican Cramer Hill neighborhood in New Jersey where she grew up. She walks the city and writes outdoors to think about the collapse and transformation of property. She revisits lost and empty houses—her family's house, the Walt Whitman House, and the landscape of a vacant lot. Throughout, Romero engages with the aesthetics of fragment and ruin; her writing juts against idioms of redevelopment. She resists narratives of the city that are inextricable from crime and decline and witnesses everyday lives lived at the intersection of spatial and Puerto Rican diasporic memory. Toward Camden travels between what official reports say and what the city's vacant lots withhold. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

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First realized commercially in the late eighteenth century, stereotyping—the creation of solid printing plates cast from moveable type—fundamentally changed the way in which books were printed. Publishing Plates chronicles the technological and cultural shifts that resulted from the introduction of this technology in the United States.The commissioning of plates altered shop practices, distribution methods, and even the author-publisher relationship. Drawing on archival records, Jeffrey M. Makala traces the first uses of stereotyping in Philadelphia in 1812, its adoption by printers in New York and Philadelphia, and its effects on the trade. He looks closely at the printers, typefounders, authors, and publishers who watched small, regional, artisan-based printing traditions rapidly evolve, clearing the way for the industrialized publishing industry that would emerge in the United States at midcentury. Through case studies of the publisher Mathew Carey and the American Bible Society, one of the first publishers of cheap Bibles, Makala explores the origins of the American publishing industry and American mass media. In addition, Makala examines changes in the notion of authorship, copyright, and language and their effects on writers and literary circles, giving examples from the works and lives of Herman Melville, Sojourner Truth, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, among others. Incorporating perspectives from the fields of book history, the history of technology, material culture studies, and American studies, this book presents a rich, detailed history of an innovation that transformed American culture.

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Counters the view of the late Emerson's decline by rethinking his engagement with liberal education and his intellectual relation to Whitman, William James, Charles Eliot, and Du Bois. Recent scholarship has inspired growing interest in the later work of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and a recognition that the conventional view of an aging Emerson, distant from public matters and limited by declining mental powers, needs rethinking. Sean Meehan's book reclaims three important but critically neglected aspects of the late Emerson's "mind": first, his engagement with rhetoric, conceived as the organizing power of mind and, unconventionally, characterized by the trope "metonymy"; second, his public engagement with the ideals of liberal education and debates in higher education reform early in the period (1860-1910) that saw the emergence of the modern university; and third, his intellectual relation to significant figures from this age of educational transformation: Walt Whitman, William James, Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, and W. E. B. Du Bois, Harvard's first African American PhD. Meehan argues that the late Emerson educates through the "rhetorical liberal arts," and he thereby rethinks Emerson's influence as rhetorical lessons in the traditional pedagogy and classical curriculum of the liberal arts college. Emerson's rhetoric of mind informs and complicates these lessons since the classical ideal of a general education in the common bonds of knowledge counters the emerging American university and its specialization of thought within isolated departments.

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Jonathan Hopkirk and Adam 'Kurl' Kurlansky are partnered in English class, writing letters to one another in a weekly pen pal assignment. With each letter, the two begin to develop a friendship that grows into love. But with homophobia, bullying, and familial abuse, Jonathan and Kurl must struggle to overcome their conflicts and hold onto their relationship, and each other.We Contain Multitudes is the sort of novel that has readers falling in love with their characters, becoming so invested in their stories and conflicts that it's impossible to put the book down. The literary languages and references throughout (particularly to Walt Whitman) bring to mind award-winning novels such as I'll Give You the Sun, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, and more.With a growing appreciation for LGBTQ+ characters and stories, and such a compelling novel with engaging characters and stunning language, We Contain Multitudes has the potential to be a commercial and literary success.

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If you struggle to get out of bed in the morning, here’s a poetry collection that’s just right for you. Sunrise is an energizing and rousing collection of classic poetry all about purpose, hope and perseverance. Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, pocket-sized classics with ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is edited and introduced by Susie Gibbs.Wise, reassuring words and magical verses conjure up the promise and possibilities of each new day. With contributions from poets such as William Wordsworth, G. K. Chesterton, Ian McMillan, Christina Rossetti, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Edward Lear, the wonderful poetry in Sunrise will inspire its readers to greet each day with optimism and confidence.

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Back in print, Carr’s powerful poems seek out and face violence and its counterforces. Julie Carr obsessively researches instances of intimate terrorism, looking everywhere from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to lists of phobias and weapon-store catalogs. She searches for what can be learned from the statistics, the statements by and about rapists and killers, the websites of hate groups, and the capacity for cruelty that lies within all of us. 100 Notes on Violence is a diary, a document, and a dream log of the violence that grips America and devastates so many. But Carr also offers a layered and lyric tribute to violence’s counterforces: love, commonality, and care. Her unflinching “notes” provoke our minds and burrow into our emotions, leading us to confront our fears and our own complicity.

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In this first comprehensive literary history of Baltimore and Maryland (with notes on Washington writers), Frank R. Shivers, Jr., explores the region's long-overlooked but substantial contribution to American letters. In picture and story, Shivers's lively account ranges from the colonial satire of Ebenezer Cook, to the National Anthem of Francis Scott Key, to the acclaimed works of Poe, Mencken, and Fitzgerald. Here are surprising stories of Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Dashiel Hammett, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, and other writers influenced by Chesapeake culture-an influence still fresh in the work of such contemporary writers as John Barth, Anne Tyler, and Russell Baker. "Nothing," wrote Gertrude Stein, "really can stop anyone living and feeling as they do in Baltimore." As entertaining as it is informative, Maryland Wits and Baltimore Bards shows us why.

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From Sappho to Shakespeare to Cole Porter – a marvellous and wide-ranging collection of classic gay and lesbian love poetry. The poets represented here include Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Federico García Lorca, Djuna Barnes, Constantine Cavafy, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, and James Merrill. Their poems of love are among the most perceptive, the most passionate, the wittiest, and the most moving we have. From Michelangelo’s ‘‘Love Misinterpreted’’ to Noël Coward’s ‘‘Mad About the Boy,’’ from May Swenson’s ‘‘Symmetrical Companion’’ to Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘‘Looking at Each Other,’’ these poems take on both desire and its higher power: love in all its tender or taunting variety.

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In Heidegger’s Being: The Shimmering Unfolding, the eminent Heidegger scholar Richard Capobianco draws on many new texts and sources to highlight in fresh ways the beauty and spiritual resonance of Martin Heidegger’s thinking about Being. As in his earlier books, Capobianco offers a meditative path through Heidegger’s thought. He illuminates major motifs that are overlooked or set aside by most contemporary readings of Heidegger, amplifying these motifs in an original, heartfelt, and eloquent way. The book also offers a series of reflections that bring Heidegger’s thinking into close proximity to other thinkers and poets, including Alfred North Whitehead, C.G. Jung, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, and Rumi. Heidegger’s Being: The Shimmering Unfolding is intended not only for dedicated students of Heidegger’s work but also for engaged general readers who wish to come to a deeper appreciation of his distinctive vision of Being.

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Robert Bly writes that it is clear to men that the images of adult manhood given by popular culture are worn out, that a man can no longer depend on them. Iron John searches for a new vision of what a man is or could be, drawing on psychology, anthropology, mythology, folklore and legend. Robert Bly looks at the importance of the Wild Man (reminiscent of the Wild Woman in Women Who Run With the Wolves), who he compares to a Zen priest, a shaman or a woodman.'This book needs to be read, I believe, not as a dry work of scholarship to be judged coolly by the mind, but as the work of a poet struggling to convey an emotional experience and lead us to what he has found within himself' Guardian'Eclectic and unclassifiable. Iron John is a work whose mentors are the prophetic poets and crazies, William Blake and Walt Whitman' Sydney Morning Herald'Important.timely.and powerful' New York Times

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The Whirlwind of War builds on the great themes and follows many of the important figures who were introduced in The Approaching Fury. Stephen B. Oates’s riveting narrative brings to life the complex and destructive war that is the central event in American history. He writes in the first person, assuming the viewpoints of several of the principal figures: the rival presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis; the rival generals, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and William Tecumseh Sherman; the great black abolitionist, editor, and orator, Frederick Douglass; the young Union battlefield nurse, Cornelia Hancock; the brilliant head of the Chicago Sanitary Commission and cocreator of the northern Sanitary Fair, Mary Livermore; the Confederate socialite and political insider, Mary Boykin Chesnut; the assassin, John Wilkes Booth; and the greatest poet of the era, Walt Whitman, who speaks in the coda about the meaning of war and Lincoln's death.

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First there was National Poetry Month, then there was National Poem in Your Pocket Day, now you can carry a poem in your pocket anytime! Published in conjunction with the Academy of American Poets, Poem in Your Pocket enables you to select a poem you love, tear it out neatly from the book, and then carry it with you all day to read, be inspired by, and share with coworkers, family, and friends. This innovative format features 200 poems from Shakespeare to Sexton, cleverly organized by theme. If you’re feeling wistful, flip to the “Sonic Youth” section. If you want to romance your lover and surprise him or her with a seductive sonnet, turn to the “Love and Rockets” section. Now you can easily spread the love of poetry or treasure it in private with Poem in Your Pocket! Whether you’re a fan of Sylvia Plath or Emily Dickinson, Frank O’Hara or Walt Whitman, Poem in Your Pocket has a poem for everyone.

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`For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious.' Willa Cather's second novel, O Pioneers! (1913) tells the story of Alexandra Bergson and her determination to save her immigrant family's Nebraska farm. Clear-headed and fiercely independent, Alexandra's passionate faith in the prairie makes her a wealthy landowner. By placing a strong, self-reliant woman at the centre of her tale, Cather gives the quintessentially American novel of the soil a radical cast. Yet, although influenced by the democratic utopianism of Walt Whitman and the serene regionalism of Sarah Orne Jewett, O Pioneers! is more than merely an elegy for the lost glories of America's pioneer past. In its rage for order and efficiency, the novel testifies to the cultural politics of the Progressive Era, the period of massive social and economic transformations that helped to modernize the United States in the years between the Civil War and World War. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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From a Washington Post critic and self-described meathead: a witty, incisive, poignant exploration of male body image, from the history of the gym to the politics of superheroes to the world of manfluencersMichael Brodeur is a Gen-X gay writer with a passion for bodybuilding and an insatiable curiosity about masculinity--a concept in which many men are currently struggling to find their place. In our current moment, where manfluencers on TikTok tease their audiences with their latest videos, where right-wing men espouse the importance of being alpha, as toxic masculinity and the patriarchy are being rightfully criticized, the nature of masculinity has become murkier than ever.In excavating this complex topic, Brodeur uses the male body as his guide: its role in cultures from the gymnasia of ancient Greece to Walt Whitman's essays on manly health, from the rise of Muscular Christianity in 19th-century America to the swollen superheroes and Arnold Schwarzene

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In the spring of 1969, the inauspicious release of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band's "Trout Mask Replica", a double-album featuring 28 stream-of-consciousness songs filled with abstract rhythms and guttural bellows, dramatically altered the pop landscape. Yet, even if the album did cast its radical vision over the future of music, much of the record's artistic strength is actually drawn from the past. This book examines how Beefheart's incomparable opus is informed by a variety of diverse sources. "Trout Mask Replica" is a hybrid of the poetic declarations of Walt Whitman and the beat writer Gregory Corso, the field hollers of the Delta Blues legend Charley Patton, the urban blues of Howlin' Wolf, the free jazz of Ornette Coleman and the early Southern Californian R&B sound of Richard Berry and the Coasters. This book illustrates how "Trout Mask Replica", far from being an arcane specimen of the avant-garde, was instead a defiantly original declaration of the American imagination.

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Following a first edition that generated wide-spread debate, Cultural Politics – Queer Reading is a bold study of the future of critical theory and the role of gender, ethnicity and cultures within academic literary studies.An illuminating introduction to the second edition revisits the book's agenda for a new form of cultural critique and a truly political lesbian and gay studies. Sinfield renews his call for an 'Englit' that incorporates ongoing study of the cultures of ethnicity, gender and sexuality.Challenging the assumptions that have shaped the study of English literature, Sinfield engages provocatively with topics such as the gendering of literary culture, the sexual politics of psychoanalysis during the Cold War and the history of cultural materialism. He discusses such key figures as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Arthur Miller, Holly Hughes, Audre Lorde and Jeanette Winterson.This influential investigation of the principles and practice that may form dissident reading, forms compelling argument for intellectual allegiances beyond the academy.

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In Toward Camden, Mercy Romero writes about the relationships that make and sustain the largely African American and Puerto Rican Cramer Hill neighborhood in New Jersey where she grew up. She walks the city and writes outdoors to think about the collapse and transformation of property. She revisits lost and empty houses—her family's house, the Walt Whitman House, and the landscape of a vacant lot. Throughout, Romero engages with the aesthetics of fragment and ruin; her writing juts against idioms of redevelopment. She resists narratives of the city that are inextricable from crime and decline and witnesses everyday lives lived at the intersection of spatial and Puerto Rican diasporic memory. Toward Camden travels between what official reports say and what the city's vacant lots withhold. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

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Poets Ranked by Beard Weight is a tongue-in-cheek classic of Edwardian esoterica, a privately printed leaflet offered by subscription to the informed man of fashion and as a divertissement au courant for the reading bins and cocktail tables of parlor cars, and smoking lounges of gentlemen’s clubs. Typifying a once-popular but nowadays seldom-encountered species of turn-of-the-century ephemera, it has become a rarity much prized by bibliophiles. See how the beards of Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau stack up against those of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Alfred Lord Tennyson. Also includes: Fundamentals of Beard Flirtation, in which readers learn the etiquette and code of beard poses and gestures; fortune-telling through beard-reading (pogonomancy); beard-based folklore and controversies (“Public Statues: Dignitaries or Dust Catchers?”)

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Bram Stoker, despite having a name nearly as famous as Count Dracula, has remained an enigma. David J. Skal, in a psychological and cultural portrait, exhumes the inner world and strange genius of the writer who conjured an undying cultural icon. Stoker was inexplicably paralysed as a boy and his story unfolds against a backdrop of Victorian medical mysteries and horrors: fever, opium abuse, bloodletting, quack cures and the obsession with “bad blood” that inform every page of Dracula. Stoker’s ambiguous sexuality is explored through his acquaintance with Oscar Wilde, who emerges as Stoker’s repressed shadow self—a doppelgänger worthy of a Gothic novel. The psychosexual dimensions of Stoker’s correspondence with Walt Whitman, his punishing work ethic and his adoration of the actor Henry Irving are examined in scholarly detail.

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When it comes to seeing depth and lateral connections in the development of popular culture, nobody exceeds Marshall Fishwick. -Canadian Psychology In Probing Popular Culture: On and Off the Internet, one of the leading authorities in American and popular culture studies presents an eye-opening examination of the Information Age’s influence on what we do, how we live, and who we are. Dr. Marshall Fishwick, author of the textbooks Great Awakenings: Popular Religion and Popular Culture; Popular Culture: Cavespace to Cyberspace; and Popular Culture in a New Age focuses his penetrating gaze upon the impact of the icons and events that color the fabric of our lives. Peppered with quotes from influential figures ranging from Plato to P. T. Barnum, this book provides food for thought that will spark smart discussion about every aspect of popular culturefrom Henry Ford to Y2K, the impact on popular culture of the September 11 tragedy, and more. Probing Popular Culture examines our cultural icons, our fads, our hopes, and our fears-and ties them into the images we see everyday in the news and on the Web. Dr. Fishwick probes the most recent developments, crises, and anxieties encountered on our headlong dash down the Information Superhighwayand illustrates the reasons behind the media madness. Religion, sports, food, comic books, TV, and movies-none escape his microscopic dissection. Probing Popular Culture focuses on: historical pioneersfrom Socrates to Walt Whitman and Walt Disney-who pondered and studied the phenomenon known as popular culture culture frenzieswhy Americans have a tendency toward trends, fads, and frenzies the emergence of America as a super popular culture with current predominance in world media, movies, clothing, music, and food the loss of old traditions and the invention of new ones hypeits definition, its origin, and its negative effect on the human race the gaps that have developed all over the worldmainly between the United States and other countriesbecause of the introduction of the Information Age in popular culture and much more Who will arbitrate, regulate, and modify our flow of information? How much is too much? What is at stake? What lies ahead? Probing Popular Culture takes an incisive look at the current situation and probes for answers. With a foreword by Dr. Fishwick’s former student, Tom Wolfe, a preface by Peter Rollins (Editor-in-Chief of Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies), and the inclusion of opinions from other authorities on popular culture, this volume will be interesting and informative to the college student, the general reader, and the specialist.

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Following the texts is an album of portraits of Whitman, as well as "Whitman on His Art," a collection of Whitman's statements about his role as a poet taken from his notebooks, letters, conversations, and newspaper articles. While continuing to provide leading commentary on Whitman by major twentieth-century poets and critics, among them D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, and Randall Jarrell, this revised edition adds important commentary by Whitman contemporaries Henry David Thoreau, Fanny Fern, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde, among others. An entirely new section of recent criticism includes six essays--by David S. Reynolds, Karen Sanchez-Eppler, John Irwin, Allen Grossman, Betsy Erkkila, and Michael Moon--that reflect both the continuing historicist mainstream of Whitman literary interpretation and influential recent work in gender and sexuality studies. The volume also includes a Chronology, a Selected Bibliography, and an Index of Titles.

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The most important bilateral relationship in Asia since the end of World War II is assuredly between the United States and Japan. Despite the geographical and cultural differences between these two nations, as well as the bitterness leftover from the war, an amicable and prosperous relationship has developed between the two countries boasting the world's largest economies. As the 21st century progresses, the continuing goodwill between the U.S. and Japan is of the utmost importance, as the peace and stability of the Asia-Pacific depends on their cooperation and efforts to contain destabilizing factors in the area. The Historical Dictionary of United States-Japan Relations traces this one hundred and fifty year relationship through a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, a bibliography, and cross-referenced dictionary entries on key persons, places, events, institutions, and organizations. Covering everything from Walt Whitman's poem, A Broadway Pageant, commemorating the visit of the Shogun's Embassy to the U.S. in 1860, to zaibatsu, this ready reference is an excellent starting point for the study of Japan's dealings with the U.S.

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Walt Whitman’s meditation on time is the undercurrent running through Postscripts, a series of reflections on finding one’s place in the endless chain of time. In linked essays, Robert Root ranges across American terrains and landscapes including locales as varied as Walden Pond and Mesa Verde, the mountains of Montana and the coastline of Maine, Great Lakes shorelines and Manhattan on the first day of the war with Iraq.Rich in “all that retrospection,” Postscripts chronicles moments of intimacy and arrival in the natural world while also charting intersections of natural, cultural, and personal history. Whether revisiting the first European settlement in Nova Scotia or seeking out the sites of E. B. White’s life and literature, exploring the only old-growth forest in lower Michigan or shifting perceptions at the birth of a granddaughter, Root offers readers a new perspective on the relationship between time and place, time and timelessness, history and personal history. If the past is prologue, his book suggests, the present is postscript.

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At his death in 1882, Ralph Waldo Emerson was counted among the greatest poets in nineteenth-century America. This variorum edition of all the poems Emerson chose for publication during his lifetime offers readers the opportunity to situate Emerson’s poetic achievement alongside his celebrated essays and to consider their interrelationship.Decades before Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson took their places in the firmament of American poets, Emerson was securely enthroned. Though his reputation as essayist now eclipses his reputation as poet, Emerson self-identified as a writer of verse and worked out his transcendental philosophy in this genre, establishing his belief in the authority of individual experience and in the essential metaphoric nature of language. Albert J. von Frank’s historical introduction traces the development of Emerson the poet, considering how life events, as well as his reading of German philosophy and Sufi poetry, influenced his thought and expression. Alongside accounts of the critical reception of his poems are public and private writings that reveal Emerson’s own estimation of his poetic project and achievement.The textual introduction and apparatus make transparent the theoretical and practical concerns that inform these critical texts. Also included are a chronological lists of variants and texts constituting the historical collation, notes clarifying obscure allusions, and headnotes identifying sources and context.

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The long poems of Starting From San Francisco present a new, quieter, more profound aspect of the poet. His original lyricism and caustic humor have been confronted, as it were, with the real presence of evil and death. "Starting from Paumanok... I strike up for a New World" wrote Walt Whitman in 1860. Starting from San Francisco, a hundred years later, Ferlinghetti roved back across the country (this "cradle we rocked out of") then turned south of the border to visionary conclusions in that lost horizon symbolized by Machu Picchu, the Inca city the Spaniards never found. These poems of voyage are autobiographical in that they grew out of Ferlinghetti’s travels in South America and Europe, but there are also poems on other themes, including several long "broadsides," which the author identifies as "satirical tirades––poetry admittedly corrupted by the political, itself irradiated by the Thing it attacks." Commenting on this paperbook edition, to which two important poems, "Berlin" and "The Situation in The West" have been added, Ferlinghetti wrote: "These poems represent to me a kind of halfway house in the ascent of a mountain I hardly knew existed until I stopped and looked back at the flatlands below. Like a Zen fool lost in the woods who laughs and lies face down on the earth to find his way."

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"Mesmerizingly twisted, richly layered." --New York Times Book Review "[Norman Lock's fiction] shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights." --NPR In his third book of The American Novels series, Norman Lock recounts the story of a young Philadelphian, Edward Fenzil, who, in the winter of 1844, falls under the sway of two luminaries of the nineteenth-century grotesque imagination: Thomas Dent Mutter, a surgeon and collector of medical "curiosities," and Edgar Allan Poe. As Fenzil struggles against the powerful wills that would usurp his identity, including that of his own malevolent doppelganger, he loses his mind and his story to another. Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. His recent works of fiction include the short story collection Love Among the Particles, a Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year, and three books in The American Novels series: The Boy in His Winter, a reenvisioning of Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that Scott Simon of NPR's Weekend Edition hailed for "make[ing] Huck and Jim so real you expect to get messages from them on your iPhone"; American Meteor, an homage to Walt Whitman and William Henry Jackson named a Firecracker Award finalist and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year; and The Port-Wine Stain, an homage to Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Dent Mutter. Lock lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey.

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The site of a thriving literary tradition, Washington, DC, has been the home to many of our nation’s most acclaimed writers. From the city’s founding to the beginnings of modernism, literary luminaries including Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Henry Adams, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston have lived and worked at their craft in our nation’s capital.In A Literary Guide to Washington, DC, Kim Roberts offers a guide to the city’s rich literary history. Part walking tour, part anthology, A Literary Guide to Washington, DC is organized into five sections, each corresponding to a particularly vibrant period in Washington’s literary community. Starting with the city’s earliest years, Roberts examines writers such as Hasty-Pudding poet Joel Barlow and ""Star-Spangled Banner"" lyricist Francis Scott Key before moving on to the Civil War and Reconstruction and touching on the lives of authors such as Charlotte Forten Grimké and James Weldon Johnson. She wraps up her tour with World War I and the Jazz Age, which brought to the city some writers at the forefront of modernism, including the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Sinclair Lewis. The book’s stimulating tours cover downtown, the LeDroit Park and Shaw neighborhoods, Lafayette Square, and the historic U Street district, bringing the history of the city to life in surprising ways.Written for tourists, literary enthusiasts, amateur historians, and armchair travelers, A Literary Guide to Washington, DC offers a cultural tour of our nation's capital through a lierary lens.

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"What this charming, moving and fascinating collection proves is that the [letter] form itself - a scribbled note, a declaration of love, an outpouring of passion, a bitter word - has always been with us." - Mark GatissA good love letter can speak across centuries, and reassure us that the agony and the ecstasy one might feel today have been shared by lovers long gone. In The Love That Dares, queer love speaks its name through a wonderful selection of surviving letters between lovers and friends, confidants and companions. Alongside the more famous names coexist beautifully written letters by lesser-known lovers. Together, they weave a narrative of queer love through the centuries, through the romantic, often funny, and always poignant words of those who lived it.Including letters written by:John CageAudre Lorde Benjamin BrittenLorraine Hansberry Walt WhitmanVita Sackville-WestRadclyffe HallAllen Ginsberg

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