The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman

More than a century after his death, Walt Whitman remains a fresh phenomenon. Startling discoveries and massive transcription efforts are enabling new insights into his life and achievements. In the past few years new breakthroughs have proliferated, including the publication of a long-lost Whitman novel, Jack Engle, along with a hitherto unknown health guide for urban men and previously undiscovered poems. Myriad other documents have become more readily available, including largely unmined troves of journalism, narrative and documentary prose, and experimental note-keeping. Leaves of Grass and Whitman’s literary life as a whole are thus ripe for reconsideration. The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman embraces this expanded view of Whitman and charts new pathways in Whitman Studies by bringing in new perspectives, methods, and contexts.

Kenneth M. Price, Hillegass University Professor, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Stefan Schöberlein, Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University-Central Texas

Kenneth M. Price, Hillegass University Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has co-directed The Walt Whitman Archive since 1995. He is a founding co-director of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at Nebraska. His previous books include Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century (Yale, 1990), To Walt Whitman, America (North Carolina, 2004), and, with co-author Ed Folsom, Re-Scripting Walt Whitman (Blackwell, 2005). His most recent book is Whitman in Washington: Becoming the National Poet in the Federal City (Oxford, 2020). He has served as President of both the Society for Textual Scholarship and the Association for Documentary Editing.

Stefan Schöberlein is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University-Central Texas. He also serves as contributing editor for the Whitman Archive and associate editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. His scholarship related to Whitman has appeared in journals such as American Literature, College Literature, and Textual Cultures. He is the author of Writing the Brain: Material Minds and Literature, 1800-1880 (OUP, 2023).