Why Antislavery Poetry Matters Now

This book is a history of the nineteenth-century poetry of slavery and freedom framed as an argument about the nature of poetry itself: why we write it why we read it how it interacts with history. <p/>The poetry of the transatlantic abolitionist movement represented a powerful alliance across racial and religious boundaries; today it challenges the demarcation in literary studies between cultural and aesthetic approaches. Now is a particularly apt moment for its study. This book is a history of the nineteenth-century poetry of slavery and freedom framed as an argument about the nature of poetry itself: why we write it why we read it how it interacts with history. Poetry that speaks to a broad cross-section of society with moral authority intellectual ambition and artistic complexity mattered in the fraught years of the mid nineteenth century; Brian Yothers argues that it can and must matter today.<br>Yothers examines antislavery poetry in light of recent work by historians scholars in literary cultural and rhetorical studies African-Americanists scholars of race and gender studies and theorists of poetics. That interdisciplinary sweep is mirrored by the range of writers he considers: from the canonical - Whitman Barrett Browning Beecher Stowe DuBois Melville - to those whose influence has faded - Longfellow Lydia Huntley Sigourney John Pierpont John Greenleaf Whittier James Russell Lowell - to African American writers whose work has been recovered in recent decades - James M. Whitfield William Wells Brown George Moses Horton Frances E. W. Harper.