American Poetic Materialism from Whitman to Stevens

In American Poetic Materialism from Whitman to Stevens, Mark Noble examines writers who share the assumption that personhood can be understood as a material event. Through new readings of Whitman, Emerson, Santayana, and Stevens, Noble uncovers a literary history wrestling with the consequences of its own materialism, and asks what this account of shared materiality can tell us about the most profoundly secular models of the modern subject. 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, American Poetic Materialism explores poets who have long asked what our materiality can tell us about our prospects for new models of our material selves.