Reconsidering Longfellow

by Christoph Irmscher (Editor), Robert Arbour (Editor), Matthew C. Gartner (Contributor)

Reconsidering Longfellow is the first collection of scholarly essays in several decades devoted entirely to the work and afterlife of the most popular and widely read writer in American literature. The essays, written by a new generation of Longfellow scholars, cover the entire range of Longfellow’s work, from the early poetry to the wildly successful epics of his middle period (Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha) to his Chaucerian collection of stories published after the Civil War, Tales of a Wayside Inn. Separate contributions discuss Longfellow’s financial dealings, his preoccupation with his children, and his interest in the visual arts, as well as the tremendous role his poetry did and will once again play in American literature classrooms in the U.S. All essays were written specifically for the volume. Many of them rely on unpublished archival sources from the Longfellow collections at the Longfellow House-George Washington National Historic Site and at Houghton Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

220 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Christoph Irmscher is Professor of English and Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science and American Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington. He is the author of Longfellow Redux, The Poetics of Natural History, and Public Poet, Private Man.