American Poetic Materialism from Whitman to Stevens Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture Series

In American Poetic Materialism from Whitman to Stevens, Mark Noble examines writers who rethink the human in material terms. Do our experiences correlate to our material elements? Do visions of a common physical ground imply a common purpose? Noble proposes new readings of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, George Santayana and Wallace Stevens that explore a literary history wrestling with the consequences of its own materialism. At a moment when several new models of the relationship between human experience and its physical ground circulate among critical theorists and philosophers of science, this book turns to poets who have long asked what our shared materiality can tell us about our prospects for new models of our material selves.

1. Intimate atomisms: toward a history of aporetic materialism; 2. Whitman's atom: sex and death in the 'wide flat space' of Leaves of Grass; 3. Emerson's atom: the matter of suffering; 4. Santayana's Lucretius: the chance for an ethical atomism; 5. Matter at the end of the mind: Stevens and the call for quantum poetics.

Mark Noble is Assistant Professor of English at Georgia State University, where he teaches American literature and critical theory. He received his PhD from The Johns Hopkins University in 2009. Noble's essays have been published in American Literature and Nineteenth-Century Literature.