scholarly journals Printers of the Kosmos

2022 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Matt Cohen ◽  
Nicole Gray
Keyword(s):  
Leaves Of Grass ◽  
Material Instability ◽  
History Of

This essay describes the editorial logic behind a recently released variorum of the 1855 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The history of the composition, printing, binding, distribution, and reading of this set of books informs the design and apparatus of the variorum, which attempts to represent something of the fundamental textual and material instability of the copies that make up the edition.

The New Realism and a National Literature

PMLA ◽  
1941 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 1116-1132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin T. Spencer
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Leaves Of Grass ◽  
National Unity ◽  
New Realism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Pros And Cons ◽  
Post War ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

By the middle of the nineteenth century the controversy over the possibility and desirability of a national American literature had diminished to a somewhat feeble reiteration of old pros and cons. Moreover, Whitman's vigorous renewal of the demand for a distinctly national literature in his 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass went virtually unnoticed by reason of his own obscurity and the disruption of national unity by sectional disputes. In the upsurge of nationalistic optimism following the Civil War, however, in the promises afforded by a strong and humanitarian Union, the sentiment for a literature distinct through its expression of the new national idealism was both widespread and ardent. But this post-war literary nationalism was short-lived. Before the skeptical attacks of many literary critics and the rising materialism of the Gilded Age, hope for a national literature once more gave way to indifference or despair. If the controversy was to be revived, some new literary stimulus, some new mode or approach toward the achievement of an American literature would have to be forthcoming. Such a stimulus was provided in the rise of realism. The conflict between the new realism and the old romanticism in the 1870's and 1880's is a well-known chapter in the history of American criticism, but the relationship of this new realism to the production of a national literature as it was viewed in the two decades before Whitman's death has not received adequate attention.

Streams of Thought

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Hanlon
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Walt Whitman ◽  
Late Phase ◽  
Leaves Of Grass ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Radical Pluralism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Public Imagination ◽  
The Waves

This chapter locates Emerson’s late-phase interest in aggregated, communal forms of intellection within similar fixations that permeated a broader cultural ambience during the 1850s and 1860s. This milieu included the oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury, whose crowdsourced researches captured public imagination as a model of communal thought; Herman Melville, whose mention of Maury in Moby-Dick (1856) portends his own vision of a proliferating and ever-closer association upon the waves; Walt Whitman, whose similar interests in communality inform the oceanic and liquid setting of “Sun-Down Poem” from the second edition of Leaves of Grass (1856); and indeed Emerson, whose 1862 “Perpetual Forces” foreran the even more fluid social subjectivity of Natural History of Intellect (1870–71). Finally, the chapter argues that Emerson’s ideas in these last two works provided a template for the radical pluralism of William James’s Principles of Psychology (1890) and “How Can Two Minds Know One Thing?” (1905).

Involutionary Politics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefanie R. Fishel
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Walt Whitman ◽  
Leaves Of Grass ◽  
New Era ◽  
New Words ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Specialized Language

I left no one at the door, I invited all; The thief, the parasite, the mistress—these above all I called—­ —Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass International Relations needs a bigger vocabulary. This claim does not mean that we need a more specialized language or theoretical jargon, but rather new words and concepts that explain the world with greater clarity. It means, as in the epigraph by Whitman above, we open our door to those who have been excluded or ignored at both a disciplinary level and a worldly one. We can invite guests from other disciplines or redraw the intellectual history of International Relations (IR) and reuse it for a new era of global or, more hopefully, planetary politics. This could begin simply with giving up the title “International Relations.” This discipline and the world it explains are more than, and less than, relations between nations. The familiar IR view of states and their corresponding nations obfuscates the challenges facing human communities in what has become an epoch named after human alterations to our planetary ecosystems, dubbed the Anthropocene....

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