Following the texts is an album of portraits of Whitman, as well as "Whitman on His Art," a collection of Whitman's statements about his role as a poet taken from his notebooks, letters, conversations, and newspaper articles. While continuing to provide leading commentary on Whitman by major twentieth-century poets and critics, among them D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, and Randall Jarrell, this revised edition adds important commentary by Whitman contemporaries Henry David Thoreau, Fanny Fern, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde, among others. An entirely new section of recent criticism includes six essays--by David S. Reynolds, Karen Sanchez-Eppler, John Irwin, Allen Grossman, Betsy Erkkila, and Michael Moon--that reflect both the continuing historicist mainstream of Whitman literary interpretation and influential recent work in gender and sexuality studies. The volume also includes a Chronology, a Selected Bibliography, and an Index of Titles.

Public History and the Food Movement argues that today's broad interest in making food systems fairer, healthier, and more sustainable offers a compelling opportunity for the public history field. Moon and Stanton show how linking heritage institutions' unique skills and resources with contemporary food issues can offer accessible points of entry for the public into broad questions about human and environmental resilience. They argue that this approach can also benefit institutions themselves, by offering potential new audiences, partners, and sources of support at a time when many are struggling to remain relevant and viable. Interviews with innovative practitioners in both the food and history fields offer additional insights. Drawing on both scholarship and practice, Public History and the Food Movement presents a practical toolkit for engagement. Demonstrating how public historians can take on a vital contemporary issue while remaining true to the guiding principles of historical research and interpretation, the book challenges public historians to claim an expanded role in today's food politics. The fresh thinking will also be of interest to public historians looking to engage with other timely issues.

Food is such a friendly topic that it's often thought of as a "hook" for engaging visitors - a familiar way into other topics, or a sensory element to round out a living history interpretation. But it's more than just a hook - it's a topic all its own, with its own history and its own uncertain future, deserving of a central place in historic interpretation. With audiences more interested in food than ever before, and new research in food studies bringing interdisciplinary approaches to this complicated but compelling subject, museums and historic sites have an opportunity to draw new audiences and infuse new meaning into their food presentations. You'll find: *A comprehensive, thematic framework of key concepts that will help you contextualize food history interpretations; *A concise, evaluative review of the historiography of food interpretation; *Case studies featuring the expression of these themes in the real world of museum interpretation; and *Best practices for interpreting food. Interpreting Food at Museums and Historic Sites offers a framework for understanding the big ideas in food history, suggesting best practices for linking objects, exhibits and demonstrations with the larger story of change in food production and consumption over the past two centuries - a story in which your visitors can see themselves, and explore their own relationships to food. This book can help you develop food interpretation with depth and significance, making relevant connections to contemporary issues and visitor interests.

Food is such a friendly topic that it's often thought of as a "hook" for engaging visitors - a familiar way into other topics, or a sensory element to round out a living history interpretation. But it's more than just a hook - it's a topic all its own, with its own history and its own uncertain future, deserving of a central place in historic interpretation. With audiences more interested in food than ever before, and new research in food studies bringing interdisciplinary approaches to this complicated but compelling subject, museums and historic sites have an opportunity to draw new audiences and infuse new meaning into their food presentations. You'll find: *A comprehensive, thematic framework of key concepts that will help you contextualize food history interpretations; *A concise, evaluative review of the historiography of food interpretation; *Case studies featuring the expression of these themes in the real world of museum interpretation; and *Best practices for interpreting food. Interpreting Food offers a framework for understanding the big ideas in food history, suggesting best practices for linking objects, exhibits and demonstrations with the larger story of change in food production and consumption over the past two centuries - a story in which your visitors can see themselves, and explore their own relationships to food. This book can help you develop food interpretation with depth and significance, making relevant connections to contemporary issues and visitor interests.

Public History and the Food Movement argues that today's broad interest in making food systems fairer, healthier, and more sustainable offers a compelling opportunity for the public history field. Moon and Stanton show how linking heritage institutions' unique skills and resources with contemporary food issues can offer accessible points of entry for the public into broad questions about human and environmental resilience. They argue that this approach can also benefit institutions themselves, by offering potential new audiences, partners, and sources of support at a time when many are struggling to remain relevant and viable. Interviews with innovative practitioners in both the food and history fields offer additional insights. Drawing on both scholarship and practice, Public History and the Food Movement presents a practical toolkit for engagement. Demonstrating how public historians can take on a vital contemporary issue while remaining true to the guiding principles of historical research and interpretation, the book challenges public historians to claim an expanded role in today's food politics. The fresh thinking will also be of interest to public historians looking to engage with other timely issues.

"The Weather in Proust "gathers pieces written by the eminent critic and theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in the last decade of her life, as she worked toward a book on Proust. This book takes its title from the first essay, a startlingly original interpretation of Proust. By way of Neoplatonism, Buddhism, and the work of Melanie Klein, Sedgwick establishes the sense of refreshment and surprise that the author of the "Recherche" affords his readers. Proust also figures in pieces on the poetry of C. P. Cavafy, object relations, affect theory, and Sedgwick's textile art practices. More explicitly connected to her role as a pioneering queer theorist are an exuberant attack against reactionary refusals of the work of Guy Hocquenghem and talks in which she lays out her central ideas about sexuality and her concerns about the direction of US queer theory. Sedgwick lived for more than a dozen years with a diagnosis of terminal cancer; its implications informed her later writing and thinking, as well as her spiritual and artistic practices. In the book's final and most personal essay, she reflects on the realization of her impending death. Featuring thirty-seven color images of her art, "The Weather in Proust" offers a comprehensive view of Sedgwick's later work, underscoring its diversity and coherence.

In the footsteps of Coelho's Alchemist and Hesse's Siddhartha, The Plateau Of Remembrance presents a new timeless journey. The sequel to The Lost Ego With Five Outback Myths, it illustrates the nocturnal visionary pen of poet and artist Michael Moon. In a long tradition of literary exploration, Moon invites you to relax on an armchair of sublime seclusion in the enchanting Australian outback. Quench your spirit and join the wanderer Zearben in a ripple of unique awakenings and realizations brought to life through vivid poetry, verse and prose in astounding imagery.

"The Plateau Of Remembrance" offers reflections of silken moonlight, in ancient scorched deserts, backdropped across the great southern starscapes, in vast orbits of endless horizons. It chronicles Zearben's mystical journey in a way that draws out emotions rarely experienced.

"The most beautiful writing I have ever read. ... I have practically worshiped the writing of Gibran and Tagore, but you have well and truly surpassed both." -Freda Scott, poet

In a rainbow of rich
poetic adventure
The Great Wanderer Zearben
climbs a beautiful dreamtime
mountain in isolated enchantment.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

Henry Darger (1892-1973) was a hospital janitor and an immensely productive artist and writer. In the first decades of adulthood, he wrote a 15,145-page fictional epic, In the Realms of the Unreal. He spent much of the rest of his long life illustrating it in astonishing drawings and watercolors. In Darger's unfolding saga, pastoral utopias are repeatedly savaged by extreme violence directed at children, particularly girls. Given his disturbing subject matter and the extreme solitude he maintained throughout his life, critics have characterized Darger as eccentric, deranged, and even dangerous, as an outsider artist compelled to create a fantasy universe. Contesting such pathologizing interpretations, Michael Moon looks to Darger's resources, to the narratives and materials that inspired him and often found their way into his writing, drawings, and paintings. Moon finds an artist who reveled in the burgeoning popular culture of the early twentieth century, in its newspaper comic strips, pulp fiction, illustrated children's books, and mass-produced religious art. Moon contends that Darger's work deserves and rewards comparison with that of contemporaries of his, such as the "pulp historians" H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard, the Oz chronicler L. Frank Baum, and the newspaper cartoonist Bud Fisher.

In A Small Boy and Others, Michael Moon makes a vital contributon to our understanding of the dynamics of sexuality and identity in modern American culture. He explores a wide array of literary, artistic, and theatrical performances ranging from the memoirs of Henry James and the dances of Vaslav Nijinsky to the Pop paintings of Andy Warhol and such films as Midnight Cowboy, Blue Velvet, and Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures.Moon illuminates the careers of James, Warhol, and others by examining the imaginative investments of their protogay childhoods in their work in ways that enable new, more complex cultural readings. He deftly engages notions of initiation and desire not within the traditional framework of "sexual orientation" but through the disorienting effects of imitation. Whether invoking the artist Joseph Cornell's early fascination with the Great Houdini or turning his attention to James's self-described "initiation into style" at the age of twelve-when he first encountered the homoerotic imagery in paintings by David, Gericault, and Girodet-Moon reveals how the works of these artists emerge from an engagement that is obsessive to the point of "queerness." Rich in historical detail and insistent in its melding of the recent with the remote, the literary with the visual, the popular with the elite, A Small Boy and Others presents a hitherto unimagined tradition of brave and outrageous queer invention. This long-awaited contribution from Moon will be welcomed by all those engaged in literary, cultural, and queer studies.

Focusing on intersecting issues of nation, race, and gender, this volume inaugurates new models for American literary and cultural history. Subjects and Citizens reveals the many ways in which a wide range of canonical and non-canonical writing contends with the most crucial social, political, and literary issues of our past and present.
Defining the landscape of the New American literary history, these essays are united by three interrelated concerns: ideas of origin (where does American literature begin?), ideas of nation (what does American literature mean?), and ideas of race and gender (what does American literature include and exclude and how?). Work by writers as diverse as Aphra Behn, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Frances Harper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Bharati Mukherjee, Booker T. Washington, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Americo Paredes, and Toni Morrison are discussed from several theoretical perspectives, using a variety of methodologies. Issues of the frontier and the border as well as those of coloniality and postcoloniality are explored. In each case, these essays emphasize the ideological nature of national identity and, more specifically, the centrality of race and gender to our concept of nationhood.
Collected from recent issues of American Literature, with three new essays added, Subjects and Citizens charts the new directions being taken in American literary studies.Contributors. Daniel Cooper Alarcon, Lori Askeland, Stephanie Athey, Nancy Bentley, Lauren Berlant, Michele A. Birnbaum, Kristin Carter-Sanborn, Russ Castronovo, Joan Dayan, Julie Ellison, Sander L. Gilman, Karla F. C. Holloway, Annette Kolodny, Barbara Ladd, Lora Romero, Ramon Saldivar, Maggie Sale, Siobhan Senier, Timothy Sweet, Maurice Wallace, Elizabeth Young

Within twelve years of the first appearance of Leaves of Grass in 1855, Walt Whitman produced three other editions of what he insisted were the "same" work; two more followed later in his life. Rather than asking which of these editions is best, Michael Moon, in Disseminating Whitman, argues that the very existence of distinct versions of the text raises essential questions about it. Interpreting "revision" more profoundly than earlier Whitman critics have done, while treating the poet's homosexuality as a cultural and political fact rather than merely as a biographical datum, Moon shows how Whitman's continual modifications of his work intersect with the representations of male-male desire throughout his writing. What is subjected to endless revision throughout the first four editions of Leaves of Grass, Moon argues, is a historically specific set of political principles governing how the human body-Whitman's avowed subject-was conceptualized and controlled in mid-nineteenth-century America. Moon interprets Whitman's project as one that continually engages in such divergent contemporaneous discourse of the body as the anti-onanist ones of the "male-purity" movement, anti-slaver writing, "temperance" tracts, and guides to conduct for the aspiring "self-made man." Critically applying various interpretive models from psychoanalysis, literary and cultural theory, and gender studies, and heeding recurring patterns of language and figure, Moon provides rigorous intertextual readings of Whitman's canon. Ingeniously employing "The Child's Champion" as a paradigm, Moon scrutinizes such celebrated poems as "Song of Myself" and the great Civil War elegies, as well as such commonly overlooked poems as "Song of the Broad-Axe" and "Song of the Banner at Daybreak." Disseminating Whitman reveals as no previous study has done the poet's fervent engagement with the most highly charged political questions of his day-questions of defining and regulating whole ranges of experiences and desires that remain the subject of intense political conflict in our own time. This radical reassessment of the "good gray" poet makes a definitive contribution to critical work in American history and literature, poetry, and gender studies.

"Nothing typifies the American sense of identity more," Mark Seltzer writes at the beginning of his 1992 book Bodies and Machines, "than the love of nature (nature's nation) except perhaps the love of technology (made in America)." The term "nature," along with a few others-"culture," "technology," "nation"-has been of central importance in American literary and cultural studies throughout the past century. The essays in his special issue of American Literature explore in rich detail some of the roles of the "unnatural" in the making of American literature and culture. Several of the essays focus on literary works-both celebrated and forgotten ones-from the turn of the century, when social Darwinism, eugenics, and other forms of the new "scientific" social thinking were being used to exclude large segments of the population from the realm of the "natural" or the "healthy." Beginning with the treatment of the figure of the spinster in the fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe, these essays move in provocative and refreshing ways through their reconsiderations of the "unnatural formations" to be found in the work of writers ranging from pioneering African American author Pauline Hopkins to Henry James, Florence Converse, Willa Cather, and Djuna Barnes. Readers interested in sampling the best current scholarship on the effects on American cultural and social history of different ways of understanding gender, sexuality, and race will find this special issue of American Literature a valuable and stimulating resource.