Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies

by Betsy Erkkila, Jay Grossman

Overview

Breaking Bounds invigorates the study of Whitman and American culture by presenting essays that demonstrate Whitman's centrality to the widest range of social, political, literary, sexual, and cultural discourses of his time and ours. Bringing together a distinguished group of cultural critics working in the fields of literature, American studies, Latin American studies, European studies, art history, and gay/lesbian/queer studies, the volume persistently opens new vistas in the ways we see Whitman and provides a model for the newest and brightest intellectual efforts associated with "cultural studies." Central to the volume is a set of provocative essays in queer studies that break the bounds of decorum that have too long separated Whitman's sexuality from his politics, and his poetry from both. The Whitman that emerges from these collected essays is renewed for a new generation of literary scholars working to define the places and the functions of his poetic words in the world. Taken as a whole, the volume points to the interdisciplinary future of American literary and cultural studies. Breaking Bounds is essential reading for anyone interested in Whitman both inside and outside the academy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195093490
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/15/1996
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.38(w) x 9.56(h) x 0.95(d)
Lexile:	1560L (what's this?)

About the Author

Northwestern University

Amherst College

Table of Contents

	Abbreviations	xi
	Introduction: Breaking Bounds	1
	Genealogies
1	Confusion of Tongues	23
2	Whitman Drunk	30
3	Whitman and Problems of the Vernacular	44
4	Whitman, Syntax, and Political Theory	62
	America's Whitmans
5	His America, Our America: Jose Marti Reads Whitman	83
6	"In Loftiest Spheres": Whitman's Visionary Feminism	92
7	Whitman's "Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand": Remarks on the Endlessly Repeated Rediscovery of the Incommensurability of the Person	112
8	Errata sobre la erotica, or, the Elision of Whitman's Body	123
	Whitman's Americas
9	Homosexuality and Utopian Discourse in American Poetry	135
10	America on Canvas, America in Manuscript: Imaging the Democracy	147
11	Whitman's Lesson of the City	163
12	Making Capital: War, Labor, and Whitman in Washington, D.C.	174
	Legacies
13	Whitman's Calamus Photographs	193
14	"When the World Strips Down and Rouges Up": Redressing Whitman	220
15	"For America--For All the Earth": Walt Whitman as an International(ist) Poet	238
	Epilogue: Whitman's Centennial and the State of Whitman Studies	251
	Bibliography	265
	Contributors	277
	Index	280

Editorial Reviews

"In Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies, one of the most diverse, important, exciting, and responsible collections of critical essays on Whitman ever published, Betsy Erkkila and Jay Grossman have brought together a body of literary and cultural criticism that seeks to undo the academic structures and strictures that erase the vital, conspicuous, "special" relationship between the political and sexual in Whitman's life and work."—Walt Whitman Quarterly Review

"...this is an excellent group of essays, some quite brilliant...it will be of interest to anyone interested in American culture or in Whitman..."Lambda Book Report

"Breaking Bounds is a thought-provoking volume that should inspire Whitman scholars looking for new ways of engaging his work and that should attract new scholars to Whitman studies."—Texas Review

From the Publisher