Whitman's Presence: Body, Voice, and Writing in Leaves of Grass

By Tenney Nathanson

"Nathanson addresses with renewed insight a problem that has vexed Whitman scholars at least since James E. Miller, Jr.'s A Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass turned Whitman into a respectable academic subject; that is, the unusual status of Whitman's poetic voice. . . . The overall result is the finest articulation of Whitman's project in existence." --Donald Pease, Department of English, Dartmouth College "What enables Nathanson to perform a feat no other critic has accomplished depends as much on his awareness of a range of thinkers from Wittgenstein to J.L. Austin and Derrida as on his sense of the qualities of poetry: he gives the term presence a cultural as well as poetic significance which opens out to cultural history, and makes Whitman as much a representative presence in the culture as our unequalled poet. I see this as a central book about our literature." --Quentin Anderson, J.C. Levi Professor in the Humanities Emeritus, Columbia University

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814757790
• ISBN13: 9780814757796
• Release Date: March 1994
• Publisher: NYU Press
• Length: 550 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.3" x 6.3"