"Poetry and Public Discourse explores nineteenth- century poetry as it addresses and engages in major concerns of American cultural life. It focuses on gender, biblical politics, Revolutionary discourses and racial, sectional, and religious identities, as these contend and negotiate with each other in the shaping of a pluralist democratic polity. Nineteenth-century American poetry, far from being the self-reflective art object of twentieth-century...

"Starting with a new understanding of what Romantic-era literature is--and who wrote it--the essays here reassess British Romanticism in light of Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Alfieri, and contemporary Italian figures such as Paganini and the improvvisatore Tommaso Sgricci. The British absorption of Italian literature and culture was mediated by authors residing in Florence, Naples, Pisa, and Rome, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hunt, Byron, the Shelleys,...