Whitman and the City:

Bibliography

Allen, Irving Lewis. The City in Slang: New York Life and Popular Speech, New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Part of chapter eight, "Social Types in City Streets," (189-196), uses Whitman's essay "Broadway" to trace a "bestiary of urban street types." [EF]

Brand, Dana. The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature , Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. A thorough discussion of the flaneur as an emblem of modern subjectivity, and a study of urbanity, modernity, and the flaneur in antebellum American culture. The study focuses on Poe, Hawthorne, and Whitman. [SB]

Dickstein, Morris. "The City as Text: New York and the American Writer." TriQuarterly (Winter 1991-92), 183-205. A study of how American writers have represented New York, with suggestions about how Whitman "made the eddying flow of the crowd not simply the subject of his work but one of its formal principles," thus becoming "the poet of urban euphoria." [EF]

Domosh, Mona. Invented Cities: The Creation of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century New York and Boston , New Haven: Yale UP, 1996. An excellent study of the "built forms" of New York and Boston, as well as the socioeconomic contexts that shaped the development of each city's landscape. Excellent source for factual information about New York, and full of photographs. [SB]

Machor, James L. Pastoral Cities: Urban Ideals and the Symbolic Landscape of America , Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987. Chapter six, "Urban Pastoralism and Literary Dissent: From 'Brookly Ferry' to The American Scene, suggests that Whitman's art "presents a world where self and other, man and nature, city and country are melded" in an "idyllic urban world," and argues that Whitman set out to produce "not a depiction of urban reality" but rather "an imaginative realization of ideal as ideal." [EF]

Rubin, Joseph Jay and Charles H. Brown. Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora, Editor at Twenty-Two, Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1950. A selection of articles, many describing New York, believed to have been written by Whitman while at the newspaper during the spring of 1842.

Sennett, Richard. The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities , New York: Norton, 1990. An impassioned plea by a lover of cities for celebrating the public, exposed, civic life and for architecture and city design that encourages social contact and interactions between strangers. [SB]

Spann, E. K. The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840-1857. New York: Columbia UP, 1981. A reliable and oft-cited history of mid-nineteenth-century New York. Spann, awed by New York City's growth and diversity, suggests that "perhaps only the magnificent eye of Walt Whitman was capable of perceiving the totality" of the city, and only then by "translating a list of occupations and activities into a great hymn to the equality of man" (342). [SB]

Thomas, M. Wynn. The Lunar Light of Whitman's Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987. Chapter six, "Mannahatta--New York," traces both "Whitman's passionate involvement with New York" and "the strains that led eventually to the breaking of that contract with the living city on which his poetry so deeply depended." [SB]

Thomas, M. Wynn. "Whitman's Tale of Two Cities." American Literary History 6:4 (Winter 1994): 633-657. An excellent study of Whitman's response to the city, to the power of new capitalism and to the figure of the Bowery B'hoy. Whitman bragged that he could move between Broadway and the Bowery with ease, and Thomas suggests that it is "the unlikely combination of transcendentalist and Bowery B'hoy that makes 'Song of Myself' such a heady poem.'"[SB]

Weimer, David. The City as Metaphor , New York: Random House, 1966.

White, Morton and Lucia White. The Intellectual versus the City. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962. An early study of the anti-urban tradition, though Whitman is offered as a notable exception to nineteenth-century hostility toward the city among intellectuals. [SB]

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City , Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973. An early study of representations of the urban and the rural in British literature by a Marxist critic who is attentive to the aesthetic, political, and emotional implications of literature. [SB]

Annotations by Stephanie Browner [SB] or Ed Folsom [EF].