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

The first complete history of American poetry of the nineteenth century.

Sacvan Bercovitch (Edited by)

9780521301084, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 November 2004

368 pages
23.6 x 16.3 x 3.4 cm, 0.97 kg

'… vast and eminently readable survey of twentieth century American literature …'. Use of English

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.

Introduction Sacvan Bercovitch and Neal Dolan
Part I. American Verse Traditions, 1800–1855 Barbara Packer: 1. Neoclassicism: comic and satiric verse
2. Early narrative and lyric
3. Transcendentalism
Part II. Poetry and Public Discourse, 1820–1910 Shira Wolosky: Preface: The claims of rhetoric
1. Modest claims
2. Claiming the Bible
3. Poetic language
4. Plural identities
5. Walt Whitman: the office of the poet
6. Emily Dickinson: the violence of the imagination
Chronology Neal Dolan.

Subject Areas: Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]