Whitmans Queer Children Americas Homosexual Epics Catherine A Davies by Catherine A. Davies 9781472542892, 1472542894 instant download after payment.

Davies examines the work of four of the most important twentieth-century
poets who have explored the epic tradition. Some of the poems display
an explicit concern with ideas of American nationhood, while others
emulate the formal ambitions and encyclopaedic scope of the epic poem.
The study undertakes extensive close readings of Hart Crane's The Bridge (1930), Allen Ginsberg's “Howl” (1956) and The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-71 (1972), James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), and John Ashbery's Flow Chart
(1991). Although not primarily an account of a Whitmanian lineage, this
book considers Whitman's renegotiation of the dialectic between the
public and the private as a context for the project of the homosexual
epic, arguing for the existence of a genealogy of epic poems that
rethink the relationship between these two spheres. If, as Bakhtin
suggests, the job of epic is to “accomplish the task of cultural,
national, and political centralization of the verbal-ideological world,”
the idea of the “homosexual epic” fundamentally problematizes the
traditional aims of the genre.