Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman: A Transatlantic Perspective (Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures)

EDINBURGH STUDIES IN TRANSATLANTIC LITERATURES Series Editors: Susan Manning & Andrew Taylor, University of Edinburgh With the end of the Cold War and the burgeoning of a global culture, the premises upon which Area Studies were based have come into question. Starting from the assumption that the study of American literatures can no longer operate on a nation-based or exceptionalist paradigm, the books in this new series work within a comparative framework to interrogate place-based identities and monocular visions. The authors attempt instead to develop new paradigms for literary criticism in historical and contemporary contexts of exchange, circulation and transformation. Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures seeks uniquely to further the critical, theoretical and ideational work of the developing field of transatlantic literary studies. The Whitmanian Moment in US Culture: Nationalist Narratives of Legitimation in Transatlantic Perspective, by Günter Leypoldt The Whitmanian Moment in US Culture explores Romantic and modern narratives of legitimation in American culture from the 1820s to the present, in a transatlantic context. An original rhetorical paradigm of _cultural parallelism_ allows Leypoldt to develop an extended and complex interplay of stylistic and political revolution and to demonstrate its capacity to claim cultural authority across a series of fields. Thus, Walt Whitman_s stylistic innovations lend political authority to his poetry, while aesthetic authority may be conferred on political practice, as in the case of admiration for the formations of democratic institutions. The central thesis of the book is that cultural parallelism emerges in a transatlantic context as an important rhetorical strategy in early nineteenth-century national narratives, becomes central to the late romantic nationalism epitomized by Emersonian transcendentalism and the poetic visions and critical revisions of Walt Whitman, and acquires cultural dominance during Whitman_s subsequent canonization. This is the _Whitmanian moment_: at once a historical phenomenon and a retrospective construction, it becomes the breakthrough point of cultural parallelism as a rhetorical strategy within nineteenth-century US discourse. Having established a strong ground for the argument in mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-American cultural politics, and demonstrated its essentially transnational construction, the remainder of the book develops the implications of the cultural parallelism of the Whitmanian moment through a series of detailed theoretical and thematic studies of the _Music of America_, _National Identity_, _Democracy and Diversity_, and _The construction of the Whitmanian Moment_ in modernist criticism. Gunter Leypoldt is a professor at the University of Mainz.Leypoldt, Günter is the author of 'Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman: A Transatlantic Perspective (Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures)', published 2009 under ISBN 9780748635740 and ISBN 0748635742.