Reconsidering Longfellow [Hardcover]

Reconsidering Longfellow is the first collection of scholarly essays in several decades devoted entirely to the work and afterlife of the most popular and widely read writer in American literature. The essays, written by a new generation of Longfellow scholars, cover the entire range of Longfellows work, from the early poetry to the wildly successful epics of his middle period (Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha) to his Chaucerian collection of stories published after the Civil War, Tales of a Wayside Inn. Separate contributions discuss Longfellows financial dealings, his preoccupation with his children, and his interest in the visual arts, as well as the tremendous role his poetry did and will once again play in American literature classrooms in the U.S. All essays were written specifically for the volume. Many of them rely on unpublished archival sources from the Longfellow collections at the Longfellow House-George Washington National Historic Site and at Houghton Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Christoph Irmscher is provost professor of English at Indiana University Bloomington.

Robert Arbouris a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Indiana University Bloomington.

Once the US's schoolroom poethe lost favor when modernism deemed him insipidHenry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82) now has fresh appraisals sympathetic to his milieu, his poems' structural properties, and his underestimated advocacy of American historical truths. Irmscher's previous work includes Longfellow Redux and Public Poet, Private Man: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200. He and Arbour lead eight other critics in a restoration of the poet's reputation, sympathetically re-presenting him as deserving cultural respectability. Andrew Higgins succinctly examines Longfellow's 1833 translation of Jorge Manrique's Coplas; Lloyd Willis finds in Longfellow sentimentalism affinities that run counter to the tradition of contemporaneous male poets. Other essays look at Evangeline lŽ