The New Walt Whitman Studies
Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions Series

This book highlights some of the latest currents in Whitman scholarship and demonstrates how Whitman's work can speak to and transform discussions in literary studies during a time of great intellectual ferment. It is organized into three sections, addressing aesthetics and politics, new reading methods, and histories of the critical imagination. This volume contains innovative work on Whitman in a range of fields. With the explosion of the digitization of books and periodicals in the past few years, the entire sense of Whitman's career is changing, and these essays are informed by the latest revelations among primary sources. The New Walt Whitman Studies shows how the latest concerns of literary analysis, from surface reading to ecocriticism to the digital humanities, emerged from an engagement with Whitman's work.

Introduction Matt Cohen; Part I. The New Life of the New Forms: Aesthetics, Disciplines Politics: 1. Whitman's deathbed radicalism M. Caterina Bernardini and Kenneth Price; 2. Whitman, women, and privacy Justine Murison; 3. The poetics of a new science: 'song of myself' as sociology Timothy Robbins; 4. World wide Walt: making and marketing Whitman's global persona Thoren Optiz; 5. Intimacies of place Mark Rifkin; Part II. Wet Paper between Us: New Reading Methods: 6. A people's pocket Whitman: the history of sexuality and the history of the book Jay Grossman; 7. 'All thy wide geographies': reading Whitman's epistolary database Alex Ashland, Stefan Schöberlein and Stephanie Blalock; 8. Haptic feelings Erica Fretwell; 9. Walt Whitman's leaves Nicole Gray and Matt Cohen; Part III. A Kosmos: The Critical Imagination: 10. Critique is not that old, composition is not that new: Sadakichi Hartmann's conversations with Walt Whitman Andrew Leong; 11. Reading Whitman in disenchanted times Christopher Castiglia; 12. 'Permit to speak at every hazard': Whitman's grammar of risk Peter Riley; 13. Whitman getting old Ed Folsom.

Matt Cohen is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He works in the fields of early American literature, digital archives, and the history of the book. His essays have appeared in PMLA, American Literary History, The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Book History, among others. He is the author or editor of five books, including most recently Whitman's Drift: Imagining Literary Distribution (2017).