Annotated Walt Whitman Bibliography, 1976-1985
Author: | Gibson, Brent |
Year: | 2001 |
Pages: | 336 |
ISBN: | 0-7734-7577-X 978-0-7734-7577-9 |
Price: | $219.95 |
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This volume helps chronicle the ever-expanding body of scholarship on America’s first world-renowned poet. This annotated bibliography collects a wide array of books, journals, dissertations, and essay collections and offers them in an easy-to–use arrangement. After an introduction, the first part contains English-language works about Walt Whitman, the second part, foreign-language works.
Reviews
"One of many contributors to the excellent Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. by J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (CH May'99), Gibson offers in this bibliography. It complements previous bibliographies by Scott Giantvalley (Walt Whitman, 1836-1939: A Reference Guide, CH, Apr'82) and Kummings (Walt Whitman, 1940-1975: A Reference Guide, CH, Mar'83), and the "Current Bibliographies" printed in Walt Whitman Review and its successor Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, which are also available at Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography (http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/whitman/bib/index.html). The decade of Whitman scholarship Gibson documents witnessed, among other things, a sustained critical interest in psychoanalytic approaches to Whitman, increased interest in Whitman and homosexuality, and increased critical attention to Whitman's markedly dark "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life" (1880). The bibliography's 900 English-language entries contain succinct annotations that "are largely nonevaluative summaries adopting the point of view of the work being annotated." Grouped by year, then arranged alphabetically by author, the entries cite works--including book reviews, revised works, and PhD dissertations, but excluding reprints and master's and undergraduate theses--that Gibson believes added significantly to the scholarship on Whitman ... Recommended for academic libraries." - CHOICE
“Brent Gibson has provided us with a much-needed sweeping-up and careful arrangement of a ten-year explosion of work on the poet. We can be grateful that at least this important decade of scholarship is gathered and arranged, because few of us possess Whitman’s patience to wait for things to re-surface on their own. . . Like all fine bibliographies, Gibson’s work will enable and generate further work. . . . His bibliography offers today’s scholars and future scholars the accurate blueprints of a key part of the foundation on which our ongoing attempts to understand Whitman, his significance, and his influence will be built.” – Ed Folsom