This book combines literary and historical analysis in a study of sexuality in Walt Whitman's work. Informed by his ""new historicist"" understanding of the construction of literary texts, Jimmie Killingsworth examines the progression of Whitman's poetry and prose by considering the textual history of Leaves of Grass and other works. Killingsworth demonstrates that Whitman's ""poetry of the body"" derives its radical power from the transformation of conventional attitudes toward sexuality, traditional poetics, and ...
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This book combines literary and historical analysis in a study of sexuality in Walt Whitman's work. Informed by his ""new historicist"" understanding of the construction of literary texts, Jimmie Killingsworth examines the progression of Whitman's poetry and prose by considering the textual history of Leaves of Grass and other works. Killingsworth demonstrates that Whitman's ""poetry of the body"" derives its radical power from the transformation of conventional attitudes toward sexuality, traditional poetics, and conservative politics. The sexual relation, with its promise of unity, love, equality, interpenetration, and productivity for partners, becomes a metaphor for all political and social relationships, including that of poet and reader. The effect of the poems is protopolitical, an altering of consciousness about the body's relation to other bodies, a shifting of the categories of knowledge that foretells political action. Killingsworth traces the interplay in Whitman's poetry between sexual and textual themes that derive from Whitman's political response to the historical turbulence of mid-century America. He describes a subtle shift in Whitman's prose writings on poetics, which turn from a view of poetry in the early 1850s as morally and politically efficacious to a chastened romanticism in the postwar years that frees the poet from responsibility for the world outside his poems. Later editions of Leaves of Grass are marked by the poet's deliberate repression of erotic themes in favor of a depoliticized aestheticism that views art not as a motivator of political and moral action but as an artifact embodying the soul of the genius.
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Add this copy of Whitman's Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and to cart. $8.71, very good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Reno rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Reno, NV, UNITED STATES, published 1989 by University of North Carolina Press.
Add this copy of Whitman's Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and to cart. $9.69, very good condition, Sold by Booksavers of Virginia rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Harrisonburg, VA, UNITED STATES, published 1991 by The University of North Carolina.
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Seller's Description:
In very good, unmarked condition. Cover is good with slight shelfwear and price sticker on back. Yellow mark on the bottom page edges. Your purchase benefits world-wide relief efforts of Mennonite Central Committee.
Add this copy of Whitman's Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and to cart. $23.00, like new condition, Sold by Great Expectations Rare Books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Staten Island, NY, UNITED STATES, published 1989 by The University of North Carolina Press.
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As New in As New jacket. Book. 8vo-over 7æ-9æ" tall. Hardcover, light gray cloth in publisher's dust-jacket. 195 pages. Bibliography, Index. First edition, first printing with full number line. Not just another study of sexuality in Whitman's writings, Killingworth's analysis of Whitman's poetry places it firmly in the context of the "sexual politics of his age." Part social history, part textual analysis, his work represents the best of the "new historicist" approach to literary criticism. No previous ownership marks. A clean, fresh, unmarked and like new copy in like dust-jacket. As new, in an as new dust-jacket.
