Book contents
- The New Walt Whitman Studies
- Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions
- The New Walt Whitman Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I The New Life of the New Forms: Aesthetics, Disciplines, Politics
- Part II Wet Paper Between Us: New Reading Methods
- Chapter 6 Whitman in Your Pocket: The History of the Book and the History of Sexuality
- Chapter 7 “All Thy Wide Geographies”: Reading Whitman’s Epistolary Database
- Chapter 8 Haptic Feelings
- Chapter 9 Walt Whitman’s Leaves
- Part III A Kosmos: The Critical Imagination
- Index
Chapter 6 - Whitman in Your Pocket: The History of the Book and the History of Sexuality
from Part II - Wet Paper Between Us: New Reading Methods
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 November 2019
- The New Walt Whitman Studies
- Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions
- The New Walt Whitman Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I The New Life of the New Forms: Aesthetics, Disciplines, Politics
- Part II Wet Paper Between Us: New Reading Methods
- Chapter 6 Whitman in Your Pocket: The History of the Book and the History of Sexuality
- Chapter 7 “All Thy Wide Geographies”: Reading Whitman’s Epistolary Database
- Chapter 8 Haptic Feelings
- Chapter 9 Walt Whitman’s Leaves
- Part III A Kosmos: The Critical Imagination
- Index
Summary
Whitman is most famous for his Leaves of Grass, unfolding his vision in a series of leaf-metaphors printed on leaves of paper. But there were other leaves in his books – leaves from trees, collected and pressed, given by Whitman and to him from friends and would-be lovers, a common practice in the nineteenth century. This chapter asks what Whitman’s leaves can tell us about the metaphor of leaves in his poetry and his purposeful linking of the world of print and the natural world. Bound up with these leaves are questions of authorship, ephemera, and archival practice, as today, Whitman’s printed and manuscript leaves draw thousands of dollars at auction, while the pressed leaves in his books and scrapbooks are sometimes discarded by libraries and often overlooked by critics.
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- Information
- The New Walt Whitman Studies , pp. 101 - 120Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019