The Cambridge History of American Literature: Volume 4, Nineteenth-Century Poetry 1800-1910

Portada
Sacvan Bercovitch, Cyrus R. K. Patell
Cambridge University Press, 1994 - 368 páginas
This is the first complete narrative history of nineteenth-century American poetry. Barbara Packer explores the neoclassical and satiric forms mastered by the early Federalist poets; the creative reaches of once-celebrated, and still compelling, poets like Longfellow and Whittier; the distinctive lyric forms developed by Emerson and the Transcendentalists. Shira Wolosky provides a new perspective on the achievement of female poets of the period, as well as a close appreciation of African-American poets, including the collective folk authors of the Negro spirituals. She also illuminates the major works of the period, from Poe through Melville and Crane, to Whitman and Dickinson. The authors of this volume discuss this extraordinary literary achievement both in formal terms and in its sustained engagement with changing social and cultural conditions. In doing so they recover and elucidate American poetry of the nineteenth century for our twenty-first century pleasure, profit, and renewed study.

Dentro del libro

Contenido

reverence and ambition
11
Neoclassicism comic and satiric verse
17
Early narrative and lyric
41
Transcendentalism
87
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
137
the claims of thetoric
147
Modest claims
155
Claiming the Bible
200
Poetic languages
248
Plural identities
324
Walt Whitman the office of the poet
362
Emily Dickinson the violence of the imagination
427
Chronology 18001910
481
Bibliography
534
Index
540
Derechos de autor

Términos y frases comunes

Acerca del autor (1994)

Sacvan Bercovitch, who is a professor at Harvard University, is probably the most influential critic in American studies today. Tracing the function of rhetoric in American writing from the Puritans through the nineteenth century, Bercovitch has argued that the persuasiveness of rhetoric is in proportion to its capacity to help people act in history. In his books, Bercovitch has revealed the power of American rhetoric as it creates a myth of America that conflates religious and political issues, transforming even the most despairing and critical energies into affirmations of the American way. Among his major arguments is the idea that the rhetoric of America's colonial sermons and histories, founding documents, such as the Declaration of Independence, and novels of the American Renaissance, all participate in the project of transforming what he calls dissensus into rituals of consensus.

Información bibliográfica