{"id":1252,"date":"2018-04-28T19:40:55","date_gmt":"2018-04-28T19:40:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=1252"},"modified":"2025-09-21T18:49:45","modified_gmt":"2025-09-21T22:49:45","slug":"matt-cohen-whitmans-drift-imagining-literary-distribution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2018\/04\/28\/matt-cohen-whitmans-drift-imagining-literary-distribution\/","title":{"rendered":"Matt Cohen. Whitman\u2019s Drift: Imagining Literary Distribution"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Matt Cohen. Whitman\u2019s Drift: Imagining Literary Distribution<\/h1>\n\n
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Editor<\/a><\/div>\n\n
in <\/span>Book review<\/a><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Matt Cohen. Whitman\u2019s Drift: Imagining Literary Distribution<\/em><\/a>. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017. xvi, 269p., ill. ISBN 9781609384760. US$ 65.00<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Published as part of the University of Iowa Press\u2019s impressive Whitman Series (edited by Ed Folsom), Matt Cohen\u2019s Whitman\u2019s Drift<\/em> investigates not only the multitudinous ways by which Walt Whitman distributed his work, but also how the great nineteenth-century poet imagined<\/em> that distribution. By performing this innovative intellectual maneuver, Cohen is able to take his analysis beyond the realm of Whitman and his poetics and open up new questions about the role of distribution in print culture studies and literary studies more generally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As such, Whitman\u2019s Drift<\/em> breaks new ground in multiple directions, helping to refine our understanding of Whitman\u2019s relationship with the literal and metaphorical transmission of his work while also identifying distribution as an understudied component of what Robert Darnton and other book historians call \u201cthe communications circuit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the greatest strengths of Cohen\u2019s book comes from his ability to situate Whitman in contexts that students of nineteenth-century American literature might find surprising or unusual. In particular, Whitman\u2019s Drift<\/em>\u2019s third chapter, \u201cTranslating the Untranslatable,\u201d examines Whitman\u2019s manipulation of international print networks to help increase his reputation (and sales) in the United States. Readers of Whitman have been conditioned to think of him as the quintessential American poet, who sounds his barbaric yawp across the North American landscape. But Cohen shows us another side of Whitman, arguing that his participation in non-American literary marketplaces enables us \u201cto reconfigure American literature not as a special property of the United States, but rather as a dependent, emergent, and contested phenomenon\u201d (105). This ambitious and provocative revision of the very definition of American literature is what Cohen\u2019s emphasis on distribution and imagination vis-\u00e0-vis Whitman does at its best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of special interest to this reviewer, who teaches at a rural liberal arts institution in the American South, is Cohen\u2019s discussion of how Whitman\u2019s work was distributed and received below the Mason-Dixon line. The South is present throughout Whitman\u2019s work \u2013 the yearning for renewal and reconstruction after the Civil War found in the poems of Drum-Taps<\/em> comes immediately to mind \u2013 but not much scholarly work has endeavored to examine Whitman\u2019s Southern imaginings and connections. Thanks to Whitman\u2019s Drift<\/em>\u2019s fourth chapter, \u201cWhitman in Unexpected Places,\u201d this important and fertile component of Whitman\u2019s poetics receives its just due, with Cohen discovering that Whitman was read in the South \u201cwith a passion equal to that of any of Whitman\u2019s\u201d Northern readers (154).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whitman\u2019s Drift<\/em> is an incredible contribution to Whitman studies and book history, so it is strange that the book begins not with Whitman but with an anecdote about Louisa May Alcott. While this may be a gesture toward Cohen\u2019s larger goal of using the concept of drift to question our assumptions about American literature and its print culture histories, it has the effect of placing the reader on uncertain critical footing at the onset of the book. Cohen would have been better off beginning the book with the passage from \u201cStarting from Paumanok\u201d found on page six, which includes the perfect example of what Cohen has in mind when he creates the theoretical framework that drives Whitman\u2019s Drift<\/em>\u2019s argument. Nevertheless, Cohen\u2019s book stands out amid the bevy of recent Whitman criticism for its ingenious methodology and focus on distribution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Matthew Bruen
Young Harris College<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matt Cohen. Whitman\u2019s Drift: Imagining Literary Distribution. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017. xvi, 269p., ill. ISBN 9781609384760. US$ 65.00 Published as part of the University of Iowa Press\u2019s impressive Whitman Series (edited by Ed Folsom), Matt Cohen\u2019s Whitman\u2019s Drift investigates not only the multitudinous ways by which Walt Whitman distributed his work, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"wp-custom-template-post-template-reviews","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888],"tags":[1925,1937,1950],"class_list":["post-1252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-distribution","tag-literature","tag-print-culture"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1252"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5735,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252\/revisions\/5735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}