1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910972640403321

Autore

Lawson Andrew <1959 July 4->

Titolo

Walt Whitman & the class struggle / / Andrew Lawson

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Iowa City, : University of Iowa Press, c2006

ISBN

9781587296703

1587296705

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (187 p.)

Collana

The Iowa Whitman series

Disciplina

811.3

Soggetti

Literature and society - United States - History - 19th century

Social classes in literature

Social conflict in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [137]-142) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Contents; Acknowledgments; Abbreviations; Introduction: The Whitman Myth; 1 Sex, Class, and Commerce; 2 The American 1848; 3 The Class Struggle in Language; Postscript: Material Resistance; Notes; Bibliography; Index

Sommario/riassunto

By reconsidering Whitman not as the proletarian voice of American diversity but as a historically specific poet with roots in the antebellum lower middle class, Andrew Lawson in Walt Whitman and the Class Struggle defines the tensions and ambiguities about culture, class, and politics that underlie his poetry. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources from across the range of antebellum print culture, Lawson uses close readings of Leaves of Grass to reveal Whitman as an artisan and an autodidact ambivalently balanced between his sense of the injustice of class privilege and his desire for distinc