The Ecological Imagination in Modern Maritime Literature: Focusing on Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and Ji-Yong Jung

2019 ◽  
Vol 96 ◽  
pp. 215-247
Author(s):  
Jin-ho Shim
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
Walt Whitman ◽  
Maritime Literature

The Poetics of American Civil War Sacrifice

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall Fuller
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Walt Whitman ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Sacrifice

The nature and meaning of sacrifice were fiercely contested in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Historians have documented a long struggle by veterans to ensure the continuing remembrance of their sacrifice. At the same time, American politicians tended to demur from acknowledging these sacrifices, as doing so would reopen the rift that had prompted war in the first place. This chapter probes the work of three Civil War poets—Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman—to uncover the meaning of sacrifice during and after the war. Dickinson’s verses about psychic pain and dislocation are increasingly understood as simultaneous expositions of the personal and political: Melville’s knotty, multi-perspectival poems about the war, Battle-Pieces, question the ideological freight of sacrifice, and Whitman sought to honour the sacrifice of soldiers through a poetics he hoped would heal the body politic. Ultimately only Whitman’s consolatory poetry would find a postwar audience.

Humanism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Castiglia
Keyword(s):  
Herman Melville ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Walt Whitman ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Creative Imagination ◽  
Critical Practice ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
Social Visions ◽  
American Romanticism

This chapter examines the career of Newton Arvin’s creation of queer humanism, combining the progressive socialism of the 1930s and the experiential innovation of an ethics of enhancement. In his readings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville, Arvin conjoined creative imagination, social idealism, and human solidarity, generating a vital critical alternative to a disenchanting “cant of pessimism.” In the works of American Romanticism, Arvin found examples of practiced movements from pain to wonder, generating both personal and social dissatisfaction (generating critique) and endurance (ensuring the perpetual life of ideals). Arvin endorsed the socialist humanism he found in literary depictions of erotic fraternalism. Within those queer social visions, the conventions of prescribed life give way to the fantastic, extraordinary, and unprecedented. In such moments—the moments that Arvin recognized as central to the romance—new assemblages are worked out in the service of human possibility. Throughout his scholarship, Arvin combined imagination, sexuality, and humanism, placing the hybrid—the dispositional ethics of hope—at the center of the American literary canon and of a critical practice still available today.

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).

Introduction Bureaucratic Vistas

2018 ◽  
pp. 2-23
Author(s):  
Nathan Wolff
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Walt Whitman ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Frances Hodgson Burnett ◽  
The Us ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter sheds new light on the US Gilded Age (roughly the final three decades of the nineteenth century), revealing it—and its literature—to be a period defined as much by cynicism about corruption as by actual political venality. It sets out three of the book’s overarching interventions: first, calling us to expand our vocabulary of “political emotion” beyond sympathy to a wider range of disagreeable and in-between feelings; second, providing frameworks for analyzing the relation, rather than the opposition, between reason and emotion in political contexts (in particular, via the affective tenor of late-nineteenth-century bureaucratic discourse); third, claiming that we must supplement accounts of nineteenth-century US literature’s utopian moods with a view of those quotidian feelings—so often negative—that define encounters with existing political institutions, as foregrounded by Gilded Age fiction. Authors discussed include Frances Hodgson Burnett, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman.

Herman Melville and Walt Whitman Write the Civil War: An Introduction

Leviathan ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Christopher Sten ◽  
Tyler Hoffman
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Walt Whitman
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