Book chapter
Whitman’s Web: The Political Poet 2.0
The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman, pp.198-222
Oxford Handbooks, Oxford University Press
2024
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780192894847.013.6
Abstract
Following the lead of projects like Documenting the Now and relying on quantitative data, this study utilizes Twitter as an archive of responses to Walt Whitman, especially as partisan political response. While scholars on the Walt Whitman Archive trace “Whitman’s drift,” as Matt Cohen notes, across the rich mediascape of the nineteenth century, this paper reconceives their tracking of Whitman’s reprints into the twenty-first century by examining contemporary, electronic remediations, uses, and associations of Whitman during American political contests and campaigns. Online publics draw upon Whitman for affective fuel to intensify political affinity bonds, an affordance for which Whitman laid his own groundwork as a postbellum political sentimentalist. This paper begins by tracing associations that readers have made between Whitman and new media, advocating for “Whitman’s web” as metaphor for Whitman’s distributive imagination based on affective media, and ends by presenting comparative counts of citations of Whitman on political Twitter.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Whitman’s Web: The Political Poet 2.0
- Creators
- Micah Bateman - University of Iowa
- Contributors
- Stefan Schöberlein (Editor) - Texas A&M University – Central TexasKenneth M Price (Editor) - University of Nebraska–Lincoln
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Publication Details
- The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman, pp.198-222
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press; Oxford
- Series
- Oxford Handbooks
- DOI
- 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780192894847.013.6
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 2024
- Academic Unit
- School of Library and Information Science
- Record Identifier
- 9984567869202771
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