A01=Vivian R. Pollak
aggression
american culture
american literature
Author_Vivian R. Pollak
boardinghouse
body
body politics
calamus
Category=DSBF
Category=DSC
Category=JBSF
civil war
classics
democracy
desire
domesticity
embodiment
enfans dadam
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
erotics
feminism
freedom
friendship
gender
gender studies
homosexuality
homosocial
independence
intimacy
isolation
leaves of grass
lgbt
lgbtq
literary criticism
literary history
love
manhood
manliness
masculinity
nonfiction
poetics
poetry
politics
reconstruction
sex
sexuality
soldiers
youth
Product details
- ISBN 9780520221901
- Weight: 499g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 04 Aug 2000
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In this provocative analysis of Whitman's exemplary quest for happiness, Vivian Pollak skillfully explores the intimate relationships that contributed to his portrayal of masculinity in crisis. She maintains that in representing himself as a characteristic nineteenth-century American and in proposing to heal national ills, Whitman was trying to temper his own inner conflicts as well. The poet's expansive vision of natural eroticism and of unfettered comradeship between democratic equals was, however, only part of the story. As Whitman waged a conscious campaign to challenge misogynistic and homophobic literary codes, he promoted a raceless, classless ideal of sexual democracy that theoretically equalized all varieties of desire and resisted none. Pollak suggests that this goal remains imperfectly achieved in his writings, which liberates some forbidden voices and silences others. Integrating biography and criticism, Pollak employs a loosely chronological organization to describe the poet's multifaceted 'faith in sex'.
Drawing on his early fiction, journalism, poetry, and self-reviews, as well as letters and notebook entries, she shows how in spite of his personal ambivalence about sustained erotic intimacy, Whitman came to imagine himself as 'the phallic choice of America'.
Vivian R. Pollak is Professor of English at Washington University, St. Louis, and is the editor of New Essays on James's Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw (1992) and A Poet's Parents: The Courtship Letters of Emily Norcross and Edward Dickinson (1988), and author of Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender (1984).
