The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman

More than a century after his death, Walt Whitman remains a fresh phenomenon. Startling discoveries and massive transcription efforts are enabling new insights into his life and achievements. In the past few years new breakthroughs have proliferated, including the publication of a long-lost Whitman novel, Jack Engle, along with a hitherto unknown health guide for urban men and previously undiscovered poems. Myriad other documents have become more readily available, including largely unmined troves of journalism, narrative and documentary prose, and experimental note-keeping. Leaves of Grass and Whitman's literary life as a whole are thus ripe for reconsideration. The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman embraces this expanded view of Whitman and charts new pathways in Whitman Studies by bringing in new perspectives, methods, and contexts.

Kenneth M. Price, Hillegass University Professor, University of Nebraska-Lincoln,Stefan Schöberlein, Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University-Central Texas

Kenneth M. Price, Hillegass University Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has co-directed The Walt Whitman Archive since 1995. He is a founding co-director of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at Nebraska. His previous books include Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century (Yale, 1990), To Walt Whitman, America (North Carolina, 2004), and, with co-author Ed Folsom, Re-Scripting Walt Whitman (Blackwell, 2005). His most recent book is Whitman in Washington: Becoming the National Poet in the Federal City (Oxford, 2020). He has served as President of both the Society for Textual Scholarship and the Association for Documentary Editing.

Stefan Schöberlein is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University-Central Texas. He also serves as contributing editor for the Whitman Archive and associate editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. His scholarship related to Whitman has appeared in journals such as American Literature, College Literature, and Textual Studies. He is the author of Writing the Brain: Material Minds and Literature, 1800-1880 (OUP, 2023).

Introduction, Kenneth M. Price and Stefan Schöberlein
Part 1. Reading and Writing Whitman
1. Whitman Left to his own Devices, Ed Folsom
2. Walt Whitman's Archive, Matt Cohen and Ashlyn Stewart
3. Making the Cut: Whitman's Excisions and Their Consequences, Kenneth M. Price and Caterina Bernadini
Part 2. Notebooks, Scrapbooks, and Mutant Books
4. Whitman's Prodigal "Pictures", Nicole Gray
5. Taking a Page Out of Whitman's Scrapbook: Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Poet's Composition Process, Kevin McMullen
6. Whitman's Paginator: A Case Study in the Interpretation of Mutant Books, Blake Bronson-Bartlett
Part 3. Whitman and Data, Whitman as Data
7. Whitman's Secret Publications, Zachary Turpin
8. Rambles Among Words: Whitman in the Etymological Thicket, Stefan Schöberlein
9. Whitman and Poe's Literary Networks, Edward Whitley
10. Whitman's Web: The Political Poet 2.0, Micah Bateman
Part 4. Fitness, and Struggle, and the Nation
11. "Arm, fortify, harden, make lithe, himself": "Manly Health," German Turners, and Whitman's Poetics of Training, Peter Riley
12. Urbanity, Biopolitics, and Race in Whitman's "Manly Health and Training", Sascha Pöhlmann
13. Walt Whitman: Poet of Prizefighters, Matt Miller
Part 5. Whitman, Chronicler of City life
14. Walt Whitman's Print Personas: 1840-1865, Jason Stacy
15. "Move Slowly Through that Beautiful Place of Graves:" Walt Whitman's Cemeteries, Adam Bradford
16. Walt Whitman and the Police, Glenn Hendler
Part 6. Whitman's Natures
17. "What is it, then, between us?": Whitman's Elemental Media, Sean Meehan and John Durham Peters
18. Whitman's Atmospheres, Emily Waples
19. Whitman's Garden Ecology of Transformation, Christine Gerhardt
20. "Flights and Songs and Screams": Walt Whitman's Birds, Tom Gannon
Part 7. Embodied Variants
21. Backhanded Compliments, Or Rehabilitating Rehabilitation in Whitman, Ralph James Savarese and Pilar Martinez Benedi
22. An Idle Criticism: Whitman as Disability Theorist in "How I Get Around at 60, and Take Notes", Don James McLaughlin
23. "The Dark Bequest:" Inheriting Whitman's Unworldly Specimens, Lindsay Tuggle
Part 8. Inscribing Identity
24. Walt Whitman, Daniel Garrison Brinton and the Poetics of an "American" Ethnology, Timothy Robbins
25. Indigenous Glyphs, Granite Inscriptions: From Mazinaw to the Middle East with Whitman's Leaves, Jeffrey Einboden
26. "O baffled, balked": Interrogating the Poetics of Absorption in Whitman's 1860 Leaves of Grass Cluster, Jacob Wilkenfeld
Part 9. Whitman Networks, Global and National
27. "Solidarity of the World": Walt Whitman as an International Poet, Walter Grünzweig
28. Whitman in China: Uncovering his Early Reception from 1870 to 1920, Liu Shusen
29. "That's Me, Not Whitman": Tin Ujevic and Ivan V. Lalic as Whitman's Yugoslav poet-translators, Bojana Acamovic
30. Walt Whitman and Muriel Rukeyser Among the Jews, Vivian Pollak
31. Walt Whitman in Jewish American Poetry: Charles Reznikoff and Allen Ginsberg, Dara Barnat