School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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Out of hopeful grey stuff woven: revision and Civil War in Walt Whitman's Blue Book

Iaquinto, Joshua Phillip ( 2018)

This thesis investigates the evolution of Whitman‘s verse through the Civil War period and into Reconstruction by paying particular attention to the anomalous and under-examined artefact known as the Blue Book—Whitman‘s private copy of an 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass that retains his unpublished textual revisions. In examining this manuscript, I intend to describe Whitman‘s interaction with the conflict in his role as a revisor: how he sifted, rearranged, and restructured his verse in response to the war. Using a combination of digital archival research and contemporary theories of revision, I develop a series of smaller readings taken from the innumerable annotations inscribed throughout the artefact. This thesis looks at Whitman‘s work largely between 1860-1865 and considers it within a process of ongoing change. It is intended to contribute to the growing body of research that examines the often perplexing and vexed issue of Whitman‘s revisions.