Specimen Days

Description

Though well-known to many Whitman scholars, Specimen Days is an underrated 'late' prose work which chronicles the life of one of the world's best loved and most influential poets.

• A lively introduction which explains why Specimen Days is one of the great 19th-century autobiographies and why it should be considered an early Modernist autobiography, and gives a clear account of its relation to autobiographical literature as well as to Whitman's own life and other writings
• Includes extensive explanatory notes to provide important context and background information for readers unfamiliar with 19th-century history and literature
• Provides a glossary of persons mentioned which identifies almost every person referred to in Specimen Days and gives a brief account of their significance to Whitman
• Shares an insight into Whitman's international reception and his own understanding of American national identity through the inclusion of the two prefaces that Whitman wrote for the British edition of Specimen Days

About the Author(s)

Walt Whitman

Max Cavitch is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (2007). He has published essays on a variety of topics in the journals American Literary History, American Literature, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Early American Literature, Senses of Cinema, Screen, and Victorian Poetry, and is a member of the collaboration committee of the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania Department of Psychiatry.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Walt Whitman
SPECIMEN DAYS
Appendix A: "Preface. To the Reader in the British Islands"
Appendix B: "Additional Note. Written 1887 for the English Edition"
Explanatory Notes
Glossary of Persons Mentioned