A01=Michael Sowder
American literary studies
Ananda Marga
antebellum religious culture
Author_Michael Sowder
Beautiful Ministers
brooklyn
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Calamus Poems
Calamus Root
Cane Ridge
Category=D
Category=DS
Category=DSA
Category=DSBF
Category=DSC
conversion
crossing
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
Disinterested Benevolence
Dooryard Bloom
Ecstatic Bliss
ecstatic experience analysis
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
evangelical conversion narratives
ferry
Fireman
Great Awakening
ideological interpellation
Illocutionary Statements
leaves
Live Oak
miracles
narratives
nineteenth-century poetry
ofgrass
Open Road
Oral Manner
perfect
Perfect Miracles
Plain Personage
poetry
ritual transformation
Superb
Transpersonal Character
Whitman's America
Whitman's Life
Whitman's Poetry
Whitman's Vision
Whitman’s America
Whitman’s Life
Whitman’s Poetry
Whitman’s Vision
Young Men
Product details
- ISBN 9780415972154
- Weight: 500g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 10 Jun 2005
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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First Published in 2005. Whitman's Ecstatic Union rereads the first three editions of Leaves of Grass within the context of a nineteenth-century antebellum evangelical culture of conversion. Though Whitman intended to write a new American Bible and inaugurate a religion, contemporary scholarship has often ignored the religious element in his poetry. But just as evangelists sought the redemption of America through the reconstruction of individual subjects in conversion, Leaves of Grass sought to redeem the nation by inducing ecstatic, regenerating experiences in its readers. Whitman's Ecstatic Union explores the ecstasy of conversion as a liminal moment outside of language and culture, and-employing Althusser's model of ideological interpellation and anthropological models of religious ritual-shows how evangelicalism remade subjects by inducing ecstasy and instilling new narratives of identity. The book analyzes Whitman's historical relationship to preaching and conversion and reads the 1855 Song of Myself as a conversion narrative. A focus on the 1856 edition and the poem To You explores the sacred seductions at the heart of Whitman's poetry. Crossing Brooklyn Ferry and Whitman's vision of a world of perfect miracles are then connected to a conception of universal affection, uncannily paralleling Jonathan Edward's ideal of love to being in general. A conclusion looks toward the transformations of Whitman's vision in the 1860 edition.
