Brian Yothers 
Why Antislavery Poetry Matters Now 

This book is a history of the nineteenth-century poetry of slavery and freedom framed as an argument about the nature of poetry itself: why we write it, why we read it, how it interacts with history.


The poetry of the transatlantic abolitionist movement represented a powerful alliance across racial and religious boundaries; today it challenges the demarcation in literary studies between cultural and aesthetic approaches. Now is a particularly apt moment for its study. This book is a history of the nineteenth-century poetry of slavery and freedom framed as an argument about the nature of poetry itself: why we write it, why we read it, how it interacts with history. Poetry that speaks to a broad cross-section of society with moral authority, intellectual ambition, and artistic complexity mattered in the fraught years of the mid nineteenth century; Brian Yothers argues that it can and must matter today.

Yothers examines antislavery poetry in light of recent work by historians, scholars in literary, cultural, and rhetorical studies, African-Americanists, scholars of race and gender studies, and theorists of poetics. That interdisciplinary sweep is mirrored by the range of writers he considers: from the canonical – Whitman, Barrett Browning, Beecher Stowe, Du Bois, Melville – to those whose influence has faded – Longfellow, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, John Pierpont, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell – to African American writers whose work has been recovered in recent decades – James M. Whitfield, William Wells Brown, George Moses Horton, Frances E. W. Harper.

İçerik tablosu

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Present Valor

1: Anglo-American Poetry, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and the Haitian Revolution in United States Poetry

2: Antislavery Poetry in Public: George Moses Horton, John Pierpont, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

3: Witness against Slavery: John Greenleaf Whittier, William Wells Brown, and Lydia Huntley Sigourney

4: Present Valor and the Trauma of Slavery: James Russell Lowell and Elizabeth Barrett Browning

5: Frances E. W. Harper and Harriet Beecher Stowe: Preaching, Poetry, and Pedagogy

6: Aspects of America: James M. Whitfield, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman

Epilogue: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Legacy of Antislavery Poetry

Index

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BRIAN YOTHERS is Professor and Chair of English at St. Louis University.