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The "Labour Prophet"? : representations of Walt Whitman in the British nineteenth-century socialist press
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Harris, Kirsten (2013) The "Labour Prophet"? : representations of Walt Whitman in the British nineteenth-century socialist press. Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 30 (3). pp. 115-137. doi:10.13008/2153-3695.2067
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.13008/2153-3695.2067
Abstract
The significance of Walt Whitman to British socialism has long been recognized: in the emerging fin de siècle labor movement, socialist periodicals printed articles about him and extracts from his poems; socialist orators spoke of him and quoted from Leaves of Grass; his poems were set to music, published in labor movement songbooks, and sung at Labor Church meetings; Leaves of Grass was advertised and recommended to socialist readers alongside economic and political publications; he was even featured in a calendar of socialist saints. As M. Wynn Thomas has convincingly argued in relation to Edward Carpenter’s Whitmanesque collection of poetry Towards Democracy, these can be seen as acts of “translation”: Whitman’s democratic vision was removed from its American context and reconstructed so that it was applicable to Britain and the socialist cause.1 For Whitman, “America” and “democracy” were “convertible terms,” interchangeable conceptually and linguistically.2 Clearly, British commentators did not interpret “democracy” in this way, and as Thomas observes, it was a “very heatedly contested term.”3 Socialists were one group who incorporated it into their vocabulary, and in the discourses of this movement, “democracy” tended to be used either synonymously with “socialism,” or to denote an overarching category which included not only socialism but other movements which worked towards creating a more equal society. In this way, Whitman, who was frequently dubbed the “poet of democracy” by contemporary critics, was seen to have a special “message” for the labor movement and could be claimed as a poet of British socialism.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
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| Subjects: | P Language and Literature > PS American literature | ||||||
| Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > School for Cross-faculty Studies Faculty of Arts > School for Cross-faculty Studies > Liberal Arts |
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| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892 -- Political and social views, Socialism -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century | ||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | Walt Whitman Quarterly Review | ||||||
| Publisher: | University of Iowa | ||||||
| ISSN: | 0737-0679 | ||||||
| Official Date: | 2013 | ||||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | 30 | ||||||
| Number: | 3 | ||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 115-137 | ||||||
| DOI: | 10.13008/2153-3695.2067 | ||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Open Access | ||||||
| Copyright Holders: | Kirsten Harris |
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