Breaking Bounds invigorates the study of Whitman and American culture by presenting essays that demonstrate Whitman's centrality to the widest range of social, political, literary, sexual, and cultural discourses of his time and ours. Bringing together a distinguished group of cultural critics working in the fields of literature, American studies, Latin American studies, European studies, art history, and gay/lesbian/queer studies, the volume persistently opens new vistas in the ways we see Whitman and provides a model for the newest and brightest intellectual efforts associated with...

Breaking Bounds invigorates the study of Whitman and American culture by presenting essays that demonstrate Whitman's centrality to the widest range of social, political, literary, sexual, and cultural discourses of his time and ours. Bringing together a distinguished group of cultural critics working in the fields of literature, American studies, Latin American studies, European studies, art history, and gay/lesbian/queer studies, the volume persistently opens new vistas in the ways we see Whitman and provides a model for the newest and brightest intellectual efforts associated with...

Challenging the standard periodization of American literary history, "Reconstituting the American Renaissance "reinterprets the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman and the relationship of these two authors to each other. Jay Grossman argues that issues of political representation--involving vexed questions of who shall speak and for whom--lie at the heart of American political and literary discourse from the revolutionary era through the Civil War. By taking the mid-nineteenth-century period, traditionally understood as marking the advent of literary writing in the United States,...

Challenging the standard periodization of American literary history, "Reconstituting the American Renaissance "reinterprets the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman and the relationship of these two authors to each other. Jay Grossman argues that issues of political representation--involving vexed questions of who shall speak and for whom--lie at the heart of American political and literary discourse from the revolutionary era through the Civil War. By taking the mid-nineteenth-century period, traditionally understood as marking the advent of literary writing in the United States,...