21 | 19: Contemporary Poets in the Nineteenth-Century Archive

(Paperback)

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The nineteenth century is often viewed as a golden age of American literature, a historical moment when national identity was emergent and ideals such as freedom, democracy, and individual agency were promising, even if belied in reality by violence and hypocrisy. The writers of this American RenaissanceThoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Emerson, and Dickinson, among many othersproduced a body of work that has been both celebrated and contested by following generations.

As the twenty-first century unfolds in a United States characterized by deep divisions, diminished democracy, and dramatic transformation of identities, the co-editors of this singular book approached a dozen North American poets, asking them to engage with texts by their predecessors in a manner that avoids both aloofness from the past and too-easy elegy. The resulting essays dwell provocatively on the border between the lyrical and the scholarly, casting fresh critical light on the golden age of American literature and exploring a handful of texts not commonly included in its canon.

A polyvocal collection that reflects the complexity of the cross-temporal encounter it enacts, 21 | 19 offers a re-reading of the American Renaissance and new possibilities for imaginative critical practice today.

Reviews

"[These essays] plumb the traditional American canonand significant texts on its peripheryto contend with the questions of national ethos and identity that resound today. Editors Kristen Case and Alexandra Manglis suggest the ways poetry might be both agitator and balm in times of social crisis, as thirteen poets write about topics such as Poe and race, gun violence, and the Black pastoral." Poets & Writers

"Displaying a sophisticated sense of poetics as well as a good grasp of history and its implications for the present moment . . . [the editors] have done a remarkable job of bringing together such a challenging collection." Harvard Review

Author Bio

Alexandra Manglis is an editor, writer of short fiction and creative non-fiction, and co-founder of the experimental poetry magazineWave Composition. Her work has appeared inThe Millions, theTimes Literary Supplement,theLos Angeles Review of Books, andStrange Horizons.She is an enthusiastic alumna of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and holds a D.Phil. in English from the University of Oxford.She lives in Nicosia, Cyprus.

Kristen Case is the author ofthe critical study American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe. Her first poetrycollection,Little Arias,won the Maine Literary Award for Poetry in 2016, and her second collection, Principles of Economics, won the 2018 Gatewood Prize. She is co-editor ofThoreau at 200: Essays and Reassessments anddirector ofThoreaus Kalendar: A Digital Archive of the Phenological Manuscripts of Henry David Thoreau. She teaches at the University of Maine at Farmington, where she is director of the New Commons Project, a public humanities initiative sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. She lives in Temple, Maine.