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The Cambridge History of American Poetry
  • Edited by Alfred Bendixen, Stephen Burt
  • Published online:
    05 December 2014
    Print publication:
    27 October 2014
  • The Cambridge History of American Poetry offers a comprehensive exploration of the development of American poetic traditions from their beginnings until the end of the twentieth century. Bringing together the insights of fifty distinguished scholars, this literary history emphasizes the complex roles that poetry has played in American cultural and intellectual life, detailing the variety of ways in which both public and private forms of poetry have met the needs of different communities at different times. The Cambridge History of American Poetry recognizes the existence of multiple traditions and a dramatically fluid canon, providing current perspectives on both major authors and a number of representative figures whose work embodies the diversity of America's democratic traditions.

  • Chapter 8 - The Emergence of Romantic Traditions

  • from Part II - A New Nation: Poetry from 1800 to 1900
  • Edited by Alfred Bendixen, Princeton University, New Jersey, Stephen Burt, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of American Poetry
    Published online:
    05 December 2014
    Print publication:
    27 October 2014, pp 177-191

  • Summary

    Benjamin Franklin's parodic ingredients summarize the artistic failings of the Puritan elegy as post-Enlightenment critics have defined them. The paradox of observing a death in time by invoking the supposed timelessness of art helps explain why critics have never known quite what to do with occasional poems like elegies. Most elegists during sixteenth century took an approach to verbal mourning that drew on Elizabethan patriotism and patronage and, later, Jacobean melancholy and popular devotional traditions. The New England elegy began to separate from its English counterparts by laying greater stress on the commemoration of what William Scheick has called a collective self that enabled survivors to absorb the deceased's piety. With social and political themes pervading the full range of elegiac verse, the chief distinction in American elegy became and largely remains between poems designed for popular audiences and those written for a more traditionally literary readership.

  • Selected Bibliographies

  • Edited by Alfred Bendixen, Princeton University, New Jersey, Stephen Burt, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of American Poetry
    Published online:
    05 December 2014
    Print publication:
    27 October 2014, pp 1167-1196

  • Summary

    For much of the twentieth century, critics, scholars, writers, and readers often set American literature's parameters to exclude African American literary artists. The story of contemporary African American poetics begins with Gwendolyn Brooks and her collection A Street in Bronzeville. Bob Kaufman's poem expands on Hughes's imagist inclination, but it veers sharply from the solid modernist elements of Robert Hayden's or Gwendolyn Brooks's poetry. In his musicological works, Blues People and Black Music, Amiri Baraka argues that bebop and avant-garde jazz are rooted in the African American experiential continuum, but still offer listeners and other artists routes toward surreal, experimental, modern, and revolutionary practices. Like Baraka and Kaufman before him, Ishmael Reed's early poems are drawn from American popular culture, African American cultural particulars, and various mythological systems. Baraka's poetic concept of othering the self makes improvisation a metaphor for both intellectual work and African American identity.

The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing
  • Edited by Alfred Bendixen, Judith Hamera
  • Published online:
    28 March 2009
    Print publication:
    29 January 2009
  • Travel writing has always been intimately linked with the construction of American identity. Occupying the space between fact and fiction, it exposes cultural fault lines and reveals the changing desires and anxieties of both the traveller and the reading public. These specially-commissioned essays trace the journeys taken by writers from the pre-revolutionary period right up to the present. They examine a wide range of responses to the problems posed by landscapes found both at home and abroad, from the Mississippi and the Southwest to Europe and the Holy Land. Throughout, the contributors focus on the role played by travel writing in the definition and formulation of national identity, and consider the experiences of minority writers as well as canonical authors. This Companion forms an invaluable guide for students approaching this new, important and exciting subject for the first time.

  • Introduction: new worlds and old lands - the travel book and the construction of American identity

  • Edited by Alfred Bendixen, Texas A & M University, Judith Hamera, Texas A & M University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing
    Published online:
    28 March 2009
    Print publication:
    29 January 2009, pp 1-10

  • Summary

    “[W]hat would happen, I began to ask, if travel were untethered, seen as a complex and pervasive spectrum of human experiences? Practices of displacement might emerge as constitutive of cultural meanings rather than as their simple transfer or extension.” James Clifford / Travel and the construction of American identity are intimately linked. This connection undergirds commonplace descriptions of America as a nation of immigrants and a restless populace on the move. It lies at the heart of the politics of Manifest Destiny, in complex relationships between the technology, commerce, and aesthetics of the car culture, and in migration narratives from those of the Hopis and Zunis to those of the Beats. American travel writing both acknowledges this connection and deploys it to perform complex ideological and cultural work. It simultaneously exposes inter- and intra-cultural contradictions and contains them. It creates American “selves” and American landscapes through affirmation, exclusion, and negation of others, and interpellates readers into these selves and landscapes through specific rhetorical and genre conventions. Thus, after Clifford in the epigraph above, American travel writing, like travel itself, is constitutive, a tool of self- and national fashioning that constructs its object even as it describes it. The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing brings together thirteen new essays that explore the ways in which travel writing has defined, reflected, or constructed American identity. Although the travel book has always attracted a wide readership and the talents of major authors, it has only recently won significant attention from scholars.

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