Walt Whitman, Trinity Church, and Antebellum Reprint Culture

Walt Whitman: Nineteenth-century Popular Culture

Walt Whitman and Louis Sullivan: The Aesthetics of Egalitarianism

Walt Whitman and Sir William Osler: a poet and his physician

follows with a wonderful piece on the cataloguing of the monstrous from the cabinet to the collections and representations of embryological monsters. Roy Porter, too, fills in the details for the eighteenth century. His brilliant essay on "monsters and the mad" fills in the conceptual gap which Zapperi leaves between these two categories. He shows how both categories reinforce each other on the...

"Two More Throws against Oblivion": Walt Whitman and the New York Herald in 1888

Antebellum literary culture and the evolution of American magazines

I chronicle the American magazine industry from its inception in 1741 to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 and explain how the industry came to take on a form that, in large part, persists to the present day. My analysis highlights the cultural factors that shaped magazines: on the supply side, the social construction of a market-based conception of authorship and a supporting legal framewo...