Why Antislavery Poetry Matters Now

Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-1-64014-069-1
Verlag: Boydell & Brewer

Buch, Englisch, Band 15, 308 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 585 g

Reihe: Studies in American Literature and Culture

This book is a history of the nineteenth-century poetry of slavery and freedom framed as an argument about the nature of poetry itself: why we write it, why we read it, how it interacts with history.

The poetry of the transatlantic abolitionist movement represented a powerful alliance across racial and religious boundaries; today it challenges the demarcation in literary studies between cultural and aesthetic approaches. Now is a particularly apt moment for its study. This book is a history of the nineteenth-century poetry of slavery and freedom framed as an argument about the nature of poetry itself: why we write it, why we read it, how it interacts with history. Poetry that speaks to a broad cross-section of society with moral authority, intellectual ambition, and artistic complexity mattered in the fraught years of the mid nineteenth century; Brian Yothers argues that it can and must matter today.
Yothers examines antislavery poetry in light of recent work by historians, scholars in literary, cultural, and rhetorical studies, African-Americanists, scholars of race and gender studies, and theorists of poetics. That interdisciplinary sweep is mirrored by the range of writers he considers: from the canonical - Whitman, Barrett Browning, Beecher Stowe, DuBois, Melville - to those whose influence has faded - Longfellow, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, John Pierpont, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell - to African American writers whose work has been recovered in recent decades - James M. Whitfield, William Wells Brown, George Moses Horton, Frances E. W. Harper.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Yothers, Brian

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Present Valor
1: Anglo-American Poetry, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and the Haitian Revolution in United States Poetry
2: Antislavery Poetry in Public: George Moses Horton, John Pierpont, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
3: Witness against Slavery: John Greenleaf Whittier, William Wells Brown, and Lydia Huntley Sigourney
4: Present Valor and the Trauma of Slavery: James Russell Lowell and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
5: Frances E. W. Harper and Harriet Beecher Stowe: Preaching, Poetry, and Pedagogy
6: Aspects of America: James M. Whitfield, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman
Epilogue: W. E. B. DuBois and the Legacy of Antislavery Poetry
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Yothers, Brian
BRIAN YOTHERS is a professor of English and chair of the Department of English at Saint Louis University.