Whitman and Dickinson

At the forefront of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson scholarship this year are several important editorial achievements and a collection of essays that explores the convergences and divergences of the poets' lives and literary careers. The divide between approaches centered on poetics and language and those grounded in literary history, cultural studies, and print culture remains. Stephanie M. Blalock contributed the Whitman section of this chapter and Stephanie Farrar the Dickinson section.

i Walt Whitman

a. Life and Adventures of Jack Engle

The highlight of the year in Whitman studies is a special double issue of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review (34, iii–iv) that reprints the recovered Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Auto-Biography (pp. 262–357), Whitman's previously unknown novel. Discovered by Zachary Turpin, the 36,000-word novel ran in six installments in the weekly New York Sunday Dispatch between 14 March and 18 April 1852. The tale follows the protagonist, Jack Engle, as he begins an apprenticeship with the lawyer Mr. Covert, falls in love with a young "Quakeress" named Martha, and, with the help of his friends, thwarts Covert's plans "to defraud [Martha] of her inheritance." Locating the novel proved challenging, since it was published anonymously, and Whitman maintained a lifelong silence about his authorship. Using the Walt Whitman Archive (www.whitmanarchive.org), Turpin followed evidence from digitized page images of Whitman's "schoolmaster" notebook, which included a plot outline and a character list. He found an announcement for Life and Adventures of Jack Engle in a newspaper database, and he linked character names and plot events from installments of the advertised work to Whitman's notebook. The recovery of Jack Engle is significant for scholars because it reveals that Whitman's fiction career continued into the early 1850s, which probably coincides with the time he was working on poems that would appear in the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855). In his introduction to the reprinting of the novel (pp. 225–61) Turpin positions the tale within the context of Whitman's biography, literary influences, and fiction career. He shows that the novel's plot draws on numerous 19th-century popular fiction genres, ranging from reform fiction to revenge narratives, and he connects Jack Engle's meditation on "the gravestones of Manhattan's Trinity Church" to Leaves of Grass. Turpin also proposes new avenues for research, including the novel's "sharp racial and gender divisions," criticism of "class divisions and religious intolerance," and "engagement with sexual mores."

b. Primary Sources

The University of Iowa Press has published an edition of Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Auto-Biography with an introduction by Turpin that highlights the aspects of the novel Whit-man draws from his own life, while presenting Leaves of Grass as an "experiment" that could have taken a different form given Whitman's extended fiction career. Regan Arts has published an edition of Whit-man's journalistic series "Manly Health and Training, with Off-Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions" as Manly Health and Training: To Teach the Science of a Sound and Beautiful Body. Discovered by Turpin in 2016, the 13-part series on diet and exercise ran in the weekly New York Atlas in 1858. Regan Arts prints each installment alongside illustrations highlighting the urban and sporting contexts that shaped Whitman's writing, and Turpin's introduction presents the series as an important source of information about Whitman's life and literary career in the late 1850s.

c. Books

Lindsay Tuggle's The Afterlives of Specimens: Science, Mourning, and Whitman's Civil War (Iowa) investigates the significance of the "specimen" for Whitman in light of changing "medical, mourning, and burial practices" in the 19th century. She "establishes Whitman's role in shifting cultural understandings of the body as an object of posthumous discovery and desire" and traces his transition "from a fervent opponent of medical body snatching to a literary celebrity who left behind instructions for his own autopsy." In the first chapter, Tuggle explores "the ecological, erotic, linguistic, and scientific influences of burial practices on the first edition of...