In Walt Whitman and the American Reader, Ezra Greenspan casts Whitman as the central actor on the stage of nineteenth-century American literary culture - a culture redefining its democratic identity. Against the context of the major changes revolutionising the professions of printer, publisher, bookseller and author, he examines the connection between the bookmaking culture of mid-century and Leaves of Grass, and between the conditions for authorship and Whitman's career. The result is a far-ranging study of Whitman as a model of the nineteenth-century American writer writing for - and sometimes reacting against - the newly enfranchised, expanded reading public of his time.
| ISBN: | 9780521109970 |
| Publication date: | 30th April 2009 |
| Author: | Ezra (University of South Carolina) Greenspan |
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 284 pages |
| Series: | Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture |
| Genres: |
Literary studies: poetry and poets Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 |