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"Murder Everywhere": Whitman, Lish, and the Fate of Self-Celebration
- Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature
- Mosaic, an interdisciplinary critical journal
- Volume 46, Number 1, March 2013
- pp. 151-167
- 10.1353/mos.2013.0005
- Article
- Additional Information
This essay considers Gordon Lish's invocation of Walt Whitman in his novel Dear Mr. Capote. The novel illustrates, I argue, a profound evolution in the representation of literary self-celebration in American literature and suggests how contemporary efforts to celebrate oneself have reversed the optimistic potential assigned to them by Whitman.