"Bohemia in America, 1858-1920" explores the construction and emergence of "Bohemia" in American literature and culture. Simultaneously a literary trope, a cultural nexus, and a socio-economic landscape, "la vie boheme" traveled to the United States from the Parisian Latin Quarter in the 1850s. At first the province of small artistic coteries, Bohemia soon inspired a popular vogue, embodied in restaurants, clubs, neighborhoods, novels, poems, and dramatic performances across the country. Levin's study follows "la vie boheme" from its earliest expressions in the U.S. until its explosion in Greenwich Village in the 1910s.
Although Bohemia was everywhere in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture, it has received relatively little scholarly attention. "Bohemia in America, 1858-1920" fills this critical void, discovering and exploring the many textual and geographic spaces in which Bohemia was conjured.
Joanna Levin not only provides access to a neglected cultural phenomenon but also to a new and compelling way of charting the development of American literature and culture.

Walt Whitman is a poet of contexts. His poetic practice was one of observing, absorbing, and then reflecting the world around him. Walt Whitman in Context provides brief, provocative explorations of thirty-eight different contexts - geographic, literary, cultural, and political - through which to engage Whitman's life and work. Written by distinguished scholars of Whitman and nineteenth-century American literature and culture, this collection synthesizes scholarly and historical sources and brings together new readings and original research.