Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America

Download or read book Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America written by S. Wolosky and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-09-27 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America explores nineteenth-century poetry as it addresses and engages in the major concerns of American cultural life. Focusing on gender, biblical politics, Revolutionary discourses and racial, sectional, and religious identities, this book reveals how these issues contended and negotiated with each other in the shaping of a pluralist democratic polity. Nineteenth-century American poetry, far from being the self-reflective art object of twentieth-century aesthetic theory, offered a rhetorical arena in which civic, economic, and religious trends intersected with each other in mutual definition and investigation. With a deft hand, Shira Wolosky demonstrates the ways in which poetry was a core impulse in the formation of American identity and cultural definition.