Table of Contents

Introduction
1: The 'Twilight of the Poets' in the Age of Realism
2: Reality Categories in Periodical Poems
3: After Wings: Sarah Piatt
4: Poetic Realisms
5: Late-century African American Poets and Realist Gentility
6: Melville Renders the Real

About the Author

Elizabeth Renker is Professor of English at The Ohio State University. She is also the author of The Origins of American Literature Studies: An Institutional History (Cambridge, 2007) and Strike Through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing (Johns Hopkins, 1996), as well as the editor of Poems: A Concise Anthology (Broadview Press, 2016). The Princeton Review's 2012 book Best 300 Professors named her one of the top
300 professors in the nation, across all universities and disciplines.