"Spirited Media" analyzes distributed structures of authorship in the reform literature of the nineteenth-century United States. The literature that emerged out of reform movements like abolitionism often was a product of complex negotiations between speech and print, involving multiple people working across media in relationships that were sometimes collaborative, sometimes cooperative, and sometimes antagonistic. The cultural authority of print and individual authorship, often unquestioned in studies that focus on major or canonical figures of the nineteenth century, has tended to obscure some of this complexity. Moving from phonography, to Josiah Henson and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to spiritualism, to Sojourner Truth and Walt Whitman, I consider four cases in which reporters, amanuenses, spirit mediums, and poets revived and remediated the voices of abolitionists, fugitive slaves, and figures from American history. By separating publication into events—speech, inscription, revision, and print—I show that "authorship" consisted of a series of interactions over time and across media, but that in the case of reform, the stakes for proving that authorship was a clear and indisputable characteristic of print were high. For abolitionist, African American, and spiritualist speakers and writers, authority depended on authorship, which in turn depended on the transparency of the print or the medium, or the perception of a direct relationship between speaker and reader. Like authorship, this transparency was constructed by a variety of social actors for whom the author was a key site of empowerment. It was authorized by appeals to revelation and race, two constructs often sidelined in media histories, yet central to discussions of society and politics in nineteenth-century America. Thinking of authorship as a distributed phenomenon disrupts models of the unitary subject and original genius, calling attention instead to uncanny acts of reading and writing in nineteenth-century literature. This dissertation argues that we should think about the transformative power of U.S. literature as located in revelation, not just creation, and in congregating people, not just representing them. / text

This study concerns a comparison and contrast of two development approaches to determine their applicability in dealing with the global problem of unequal development. Chapter I introduces the purpose and the significance of the study, and the selection of one representative model for each approach. They are W. W. Rostow's model and Samir Amin's model. Chapter II elucidates Rostow's model. Chapter III explains Amin's model. Chapter IV presents a comparison and contrast of the two models both methodologically and conceptually. Chapter V contains the conclusion that Rostow' s model cannot be a universal development model due to its methodological shortcomings, whereas Amin's model should be accepted for its analysis in explaining the reasons' for today's unequal development on a world scale.

Taking a cue from the occasional reticence of the often-exuberant American Romantic poetics, this project tracks what I call “rhetorics of silence” in verse: those moments where words are declared to be inadequate, impertinent, unavailable, unintelligible or otherwise unsuitable for a task that the poet has proposed. In this respect, the term “silence” functions here as a broad metaphor encompassing a number of meta-linguistic or meta-poetic gestures aimed at highlighting the shortcomings of knowledge and representation. Whereas earlier critics have noticed these silences in haphazard ways, this project looks toward a systematic account of why and when nineteenth-century poets rely on gestures to the space beyond language. This intervention is especially useful for reading the seminal American poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Because Whitman seems celebratory and Dickinson doleful, it has often been difficult to offer productive readings of the two in tandem. Where Whitman does resemble Dickinson, it is often thought to be in his poems that abandon or despair of his project for a democratic poetics. By contrast, working through the lyric and political verse of the lesser-known poetry of John Rollin Ridge, this project reads visionary and despairing silences as alike rhetorical gestures aimed at highlighting the common humanity of the poet and the reader. “Silence” is therefore an outgrowth of American ideology, albeit one that frequently allows poets to expand and query that ideology in ways that are not possible in the many corresponding but often blither deployments of rhetorical silence in the culture at large.

The poetry, prose, and personality of Walt Whitman have attained a truly global circulation, and scholarship continues to reveal his complex and lasting impact on literature, art, and politics around the world. This dissertation reveals Walt Whitman's extensive appropriation by the Latin American avant-garde, an artistic current that encompassed dozens of regional, national and transnational vanguardia movements across the Americas from roughly 1918 through the late 1930s. My work tells the story of how these pugnacious literary and artistic communities used Whitman as the raw material for a self-consciously "modern" art, as they circulated, adapted, and repurposed the US poet and his texts. The dissertation moves from south to north, beginning in Chile, proceeding to Nicaragua and Mexico, and ending with Latino writers in the United States. "Out of Place: Walt Whitman and the Latin American Avant-Gardes" argues that the literary and political appropriation of Whitman becomes a part of these movements' active participation in the hemispheric and global conversation of their day. What these aggressive avant-garde groups find useful, provocative, or generative in Whitman, then, offers us a unique perspective that cannot be left out of American literary studies. For as they wrestle with Whitman and the concept of "America," as they adapt Whitman into their notions of art, of nation and of language, and as they read him against the backdrop of globalization and modernity, a new Walt Whitman emerges, a vanguardista Whitman who sheds new light on the enduring relevance of his own radical project of making a poetry for the Americas.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the medieval Florentine poet Dante Alighieri was an almost completely unknown figure in the United States. Yet, by mid-century, he was considered by many Americans to be one of the world's greatest poets and his major epic, the Divine Comedy, was translated during the Civil War by the most popular American poet at the time, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This dissertation examines Dante's nineteenth-century emergence in the United States and the historical and cultural reasons why Dante, for many nineteenth-century Americans, became a highly-regarded literary figure and an unexpectedly popular poet during the Civil War. Using new historicist and book studies methodologies, it argues that Dante was widely viewed as an important theological-political poet, a cultural representative of Italy and nineteenth-century Italian nationalism and liberalism, one who spoke powerfully to antebellum and wartime issues of national disunity, states' rights, the nature of empire, and the justice and injustice of civil war. American periodicals and English-language translations of the Comedy touted Dante as a great national poet--a model who might inspire any would-be national poet of the United States--while interpreting his biography and the Comedy in terms of American and transatlantic political events, ideologies, and discourses. Aware of such promotion, many American writers, including Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman, read and interpreted the Comedy in terms of national politics and, by the early 1860s, the Civil War. Given its relevance and popularity during the 1860s--numerous books by or about Dante were published in the United States during this decade--the Divine Comedy thus became an important epic poem of the Civil War, a poem that Longfellow and Walt Whitman turned to while constructing their wartime and Reconstruction-era poetry.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Chicago. / Includes bibliographical references: leaves [274]-284. Also available on the Internet.

<p>This dissertation traces the evolution of Whitman's democratic thinking across the first four editions of Leaves of Grass, covering the auspicious years 1855, 1856, 1860 and 1867. While democracy is the master political term within Whitman's later editions, it was nearly devoid from the original one, in which republican political concepts were still regnant. The argument put forth is that in the space of twelve years, Whitman's relationship to democracy went through a strikingly classic dialectic trajectory: emergence, consolidation and fissure. The immediate engine driving this progression was the Civil War, but behind this immediate cause was the slower, broader motor of modernization, particularly modernization's expansion of markets, for in the market's circulation and interconnection of people and commodities Whitman saw a model for an expansive and integrative democratic collectivity. The first chapter explores the importance to Whitman of the physical print room as a uniquely hybrid site in the course of modernization, for while it was one of the first to exploit the expanding industrial market, it also maintained pre-industrial forms of artisanal labor late into that progression. The print room thus became a site where the industrial market's reach and pre-industrial labor's affective relationship to the product and its consumers could be combined, and the print room therefore plays a central role, in ways both subtle and profound, in Whitman's poetry, in his understanding of the emerging democratic nation, and in his own literary productive practice. The second chapter turns from an investigation of democratic social space to an investigation of democratic time, noting how a nearly forgotten event, a loan between Whitman and James Parton, ended the "afflatus" under which the early editions were produced and prompted Whitman to revamp Leaves' relationship to history. Whitman's experience of personal debt failure led him to reconsider the ways in which his political project was susceptible to similar collapse, for the circuits of affective connection upon which his democratic project was based depended not only on their reach through space but on their forward projection through time, particularly the continual recycling of death into life, what Whitman called the "perpetual payment of the perpetual loan." Whitman sought to reduce this contingency by abstracting the political project of the work from his immediate social world (America) to a political philosophy (democracy) which stood above and outside of time. The 1860 edition thus marked the emergence of democracy as the book's central political philosophy. Yet this strategy proved insufficient when Whitman confronted the one barrier to affective exchange that his verse could not bridge: the dead bodies of the Union soldiers. This unbridgeable difference reverberated outward through the circuits of Whitman's poetry, dismantling the political and affective structures he had been building up to 1860. A text which previously declared the absence of both the past and death - "the greatest poet ... places himself where the future becomes present," "the smallest sprout shows there is really no death" - now becomes doubly haunted by ghosts, once by the dead bodies of Union soldiers which, as much as Whitman declares he "will henceforth forget," he cannot, and again by the strange emergence of new "Phantoms, gigantic, superb." These phantoms represent for Whitman the inversion of democracy's promise, democracy become nightmarish and zombie-like, and his fundamental triangle is haunted by its inverse: a melancholic Whitman; the overmastering re-emergence of the "bards of the past" and explicitly antiquated poetic forms; and a threatening, sovereign federal power autonomous from the people. The revisions Whitman introduced to the post-war edition of 1867 tell the story of a crisis in democratic confidence on behalf of democracy's former champion. Taken all together, the first four editions of Leaves form a chronicle of the archetypal democratic poet's struggle with democracy during U.S. democracy's most critical decade.</p> / Dissertation

While scholarship on Walt Whitman has often dealt with "mysticism" as an important element of his writings and worldview, few critics have acknowledged the importance of Whitman's disciples in the development of the idea of secular comparative mysticism. While critics have often speculated about the religion Whitman attempted to inculcate, they have too often ignored the secularized spirituality that the poet's early readers developed in response to his poems. While critics have postulated that Whitman intended to revolutionize the consciousness of his readers, they have largely ignored the cases where this kind of response demonstrably occurred. "Hot Little Prophets" examines three of Walt Whitman's most enthusiastic early readers and disciples, Anne Gilchrist, Richard Maurice Bucke, and Edward Carpenter. This dissertation shows how these disciples responded to the unprecedented reader-engagement techniques employed in Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and how their readings of that book (and of Whitman himself) provided them with new models of identity, politics, and sexuality, new focuses of desire, and new ways in which to interpret their own lives and experiences. This historicized reader-response approach, informed by a contexualist understanding of mystical experience, provides an opportunity to study how meaning is created through the interaction of Whitman's poems and his readers' expectations, backgrounds, needs, and desires. It also shows how what has come to be called mystical experience occurs in a human context: how it is formed out of a complicated interaction of text and interpretation (sometimes misinterpretation), experience and desire, context and stimulus. The dissertation considers each disciple's education and upbringing, intellectual influences, habits of reading, and early religious attitudes as a foreground to the study of his or her initial reaction to Leaves of Grass. Separate chapters on the three figures investigate the crises of identity, vocation, faith, and sexuality that informed their reactions. Each chapter traces the development of the disciples' understanding of Whitman's poetry over a span of years, focusing especially on the complex role mystical experience played in their interpretation of Whitman and his works.

I argue that the procession is a deliberate, desirable, and destabilizing social formation. In scholarship of the American nineteenth century, the procession is lost among the clutter of other urban assemblies—crowds, parades, riots—and never fully articulated as a unique vehicle for collective expression. The procession is an attractive alternative to tyrannical majorities and unwise crowds because of its linearity, rationality, and encompassment. Central to the trope of the procession, however, is the wayside or the periphery, adjacent spaces which are often discarded or suppressed by the procession’s forward movement. I trace the variations of this American allegory—national progress and its exclusions—across different genres in the writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne (domestic-cosmic sketches), Walt Whitman (war-time poetic fantasies), Emily Dickinson (regal satires), and as an informing but repudiated element of Martin Delany’s novel Blake; or The Huts of America. These authors critique chaotic and gaudy groups, and instead propose gentle and haptic ones. Whitman, Dickinson, and Delany also have in common their oblique contemplations of the Civil War and President Lincoln’s assassination. Although Lincoln’s multi-state funeral procession is an overwrought spectacle, the procession is so often virtuous because it is the opposite of the state funeral: the authors I consider presuppose, in their sporadic ways, an austere nature to the procession, as fundamental as the dictums “We, the people” or E pluribus unum. Yet, the “grand difficulty,” in Hawthorne’s words, is that in reality and on the streets, the procession’s conceptual intuitiveness—as all-inclusive and leveling as a “procession of life”—recedes from view, deteriorates into chaos, and must be constantly rehabilitated. My tropological analysis of American literature grapples with a vision of democratic organization and process that is not conceived of as the result of collective self-articulation and -determination. What is startling about membership in a procession is how often it does not respect individual choice. It is coercive; you are participating. The procession’s “measured and beautiful motion,” in Whitman’s words, topples assertive modes of authorship, leadership, and ownership because ever-present waysides flatten the hierarchy of center over periphery. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2012-08-03 12:51:58.064

This thesis contemplates Walt Whitman's role in the lives of 19th and 20th century women writers and his significance to early American feminism. I consider the ways women inspired him to develop pro-feminist ideas about maternity, womanhood, and female liberation.