| Description |
1 online resource (x, 302 pages). |
| Series |
Edinburgh studies in transatlantic literatures |
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Edinburgh studies in transatlantic literatures.
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| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 261-288) and index. |
| Summary |
"Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman puts narratives of cultural legitimation in nineteenth-century US literature in a transatlantic context. Exploring how literary professionalism shapes romantic and modern cultural space, GA1/4nter Leypoldt traces the nineteenth-century fusion of poetic radicalism with cultural nationalism from its beginnings in early romanticism to the poetry and poetics of Walt Whitman and Whitman's modernist reinvention as an icon of a native avant-garde. Whitman made cultural nationalism compatible with the rhetorical needs of professional authorship by trying to hold national authenticity and literary authority in a single poetic vision. Yet the notion that his 'language experiment' transformed essential democratic experience into a genuine American aesthetics also owes much to Whitman's retrospective canonization. What Leypoldt calls Whitmanian authority is thus a transatlantic and transhistorical discursive construct that can be approached from four angles. This book begins with an overview of transatlantic contexts such as the nineteenth-century literary field (Bourdieu) and the romantic turn to expressivism (Taylor). A detailed analysis follows on the development of Whitman's positions from the intellectual habitus and cultural criticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. A third section on Whitmanian authority is located within three conceptual fields that function as contact zones for European and American theories of culture: romantic notions of national style as a kind of music; place-centered concepts of national aesthetics; and traditional ideas about the aesthetic effects of democratic institutions. A final section on Whitman's reinvention between the 1870s and the 1940s discusses how the heterogeneous nineteenth-century perceptions of Whitman's work were streamlined into a modernist version of Whitman's nationalist program"--Publisher description. |
| Note |
Print version record. |
| Contents |
Cover; Copyright; CONTENTS; PREFACE; ACKNOWLEDGMENTS; INTRODUCTION: WHITMAN AND THE 'LAWLESS MUSIC' OF AMERICAN CULTURE; TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXTS OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY US DISCOURCE; CHAPTER 1 THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY INTELLECTUAL FIELD; CHAPTER 2 US DISCOURSE AND THE EXPRESSIVIST TURN; REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS; CHAPTER 3 THE POET AS ORPHIC SINGER: RALPH WALDO EMERSON; CHAPTER 4 WALT WHITMAN AND THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE; CONCEPTUAL FIELDS OF US CULTURE; CHAPTER 5 THE MUSIC OF AMERICA; Chapter 6 NATIONAL IDENTITY AND THE SMELL OF THE WOODS; Chapter 7 THE DEMOCRATIC MUSE. |
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INVENTING WHITMANIAN AUTHORITYChapter 8 CONTEMPORARY RECEPTION; Chapter 9 WHITMAN AMONG THE MODERNS; EPILOG: AFTER THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE; BIBLIOGRAPHY; INDEX. |
| Subject |
Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892 -- Criticism and interpretation.
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Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892. (OCoLC)fst00039575
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Whitman, Walt.
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LITERARY CRITICISM -- Poetry.
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SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Anthropology -- Cultural.
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| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc. (OCoLC)fst01411635
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| Other Form: |
Print version: Leypoldt, Günter. Cultural authority in the age of Whitman. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, ©2009 9780748635740 (DLC) 2009675446 (OCoLC)426118964 |
| ISBN |
9780748635757 (electronic bk.) |
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0748635750 (electronic bk.) |
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