Longfellow Redux

The time has come to take another look at Longfellow. Christoph Irmscher's new book overturns the modern prejudice against Longfellow as the mere purveyor of literary comfort food. Examining his unpublished papers alongside letters written by Longfellow's fans both at home and abroad, Irmscher offers a fresh view of the poet's connection with his audience. In chapters about his idea of authorship, his travels, and his translations, Irmscher demonstrates that Longfellow saw literature as a transnational conversation breaking down social and linguistic barriers. For Longfellow, the poet was less Emerson's liberating god than the distributor of cultural goods democratically shared by authors and readers alike. Longfellow Redux is the first book-length study of Longfellow's poetry since 1966 and contains many illustrations, including unpublished pencil sketches by Longfellow himself.

Literature & Fiction

Irmscher, Christoph

History & Criticism

University of Illinois Press

The time has come to take another look at Longfellow, America's most popular poet. Christoph Irmscher overturns the modern prejudice against Longfellow as the mere purveyor of literary comfort food. Examining his unpublished papers alongside letters written by his fans at home and abroad, Irmscher offers a fresh view of the poet's connection with his audience. Irmscher demonstrates that Longfellow saw literature as a transnational conversation breaking down social and linguistic barriers. For Longfellow, the poet was less Emerson's "liberating god" than a distributor of cultural goods democratically shared by authors and readers alike. Longfellow Redux is the first book-length study of Longfellow's poetry since 1966 and contains numerous illustrations, including previously unpublished pencil sketches by Longfellow himself.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

The visual arts and sciences have a shared history of creativity and parallel paths of experimentation, goal seeking, and trial and error. Both disciplines employ innovative techniques and novel materials that help their practitioners develop new ideas, discoveries, and visual products. [RE]Imagining Science, a catalogue featuring art and science projects primarily based at Indiana University, highlights distinctive types of collaborations that occur within this genre of contemporary practice.

[RE]Imagining Science

Arts & Photography

Purcell, Rosamond

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Indiana University Press

The definitive biography of a radical activist and intellectual Max Eastman (1883–1969) was a prolific writer, radical, and public intellectual who helped shape the twentieth century. While researching this masterful work, acclaimed biographer Christoph Irmscher was granted unprecedented access to the Eastman family archive, allowing him to document little-known aspects of the famously handsome and charismatic radical. Considered one of the “hottest radicals” of his time, Eastman edited two of the most important modernist magazines, The Masses and The Liberator, and campaigned for women’s suffrage and world peace. A fierce critic of Joseph Stalin, Eastman befriended and translated Leon Trotsky and remained unafraid to express unpopular views, drawing criticism from both conservatives and the Left. Set against the backdrop of several decades of political and ideological turmoil, and interweaving Eastman’s singular life with stories of the fascinating people he knew and loved, this book will have broad interdisciplinary appeal in twentieth-century history and politics, intellectual history, and literary studies.

Max Eastman: A Life

Historical

Yale University Press

Charismatic and controversial, Louis Agassiz is our least known revolutionary—some fifty years after American independence, he became a founding father of American science. 
One hundred and seventy-five years ago, a Swiss immigrant took America by storm, launching American science as we know it. The irrepressible Louis Agassiz, legendary at a young age for his work on mountain glaciers, focused his prodigious energies on the fauna of the New World. Invited to deliver a series of lectures in Boston, he never left, becoming the most famous scientist of his time. A pioneer in field research and an obsessive collector, Agassiz enlisted the American public in a vast campaign to send him natural specimens, dead or alive, for his ingeniously conceived museum of comparative zoology. As an educator of enduring impact, he trained a generation of American scientists and science teachers, men and women alike. Irmscher sheds new light on Agassiz’s fascinating partnership with his brilliant wife, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, a science writer in her own right who would go on to become the first president of Radcliffe College. 
But there’s a dark side to the story. Irmscher adds unflinching evidence of Agassiz’s racist impulses and shows how avidly Americans looked to men of science to mediate race policy. The book’s potent, original scenes include the pitched battle between Agassiz and his student Henry James Clark as well as the merciless, often amusing exchanges between Darwin and Harvard botanist Asa Gray over Agassiz’s stubborn resistance to evolution. 
A fascinating life story, both inspiring and cautionary, for anyone interested in the history of American ideas.

Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

The Poetics of Natural History is about the “daydreams” of early American naturalists (from 1730 to 1868) and the collections they created around these dreams. Christoph Irmscher explores how, through the acts of organizing physical artifacts and reflecting upon their collections through writings and images, naturalists from John Bartram to Louis Agassiz were making sense of themselves and their world. These collections allowed them, in a way, to collect themselves. In the first part of his book, Irmscher offers us a guided tour of the actual collections, beginning in Bartram’s disorderly botanical garden in Philadelphia and taking us through the artful display of animals in Charles Wilson Peale’s collections and, finally, to the “halls of humbug” of P. T. Barnum’s American Museum. The second part of the book moves away from the collections, and explores natural history words and images. Irmscher unforgettably describes American collectors’ fascination and horror with the American rattlesnake, and invokes the violent and beautiful world of American birds as described in John James Audubon’s paintings and writings. His book ends with a description of Louis Agassiz’s 1865 expedition to Brazil as seen through the eyes of the young William James, who reluctantly gathered Brazilian fish while his mentor assembled “proof” that some human beings were less human than others.

The Poetics of Natural History: From John Bartram to William James

History

Rutgers University Press

<div>A major monograph published to accompany the first museum survey of the renowned photographer and conceptual artist Rosamond Purcell (b. 1942), known for her strangely beautiful, often unsettling photographs of objects from the natural and man-made</div>

Rosamond Purcell: Nature Stands Aside

Rathbone, Belinda

Dion, Mark

Morris, Errol

Wilkins, Gordon

Graphic Design

Rizzoli Electa

The most popular American poet of his day, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was a multiculturalist before the term was invented. He passionately believed in the value of foreign travel and conceived of American literature as deeply "transatlantic." A polyglot poet-scholar, the first American to translate Dante's entire Divine Comedy, he was also a hands-on, unconventional father who produced numerous Edward Lear–like drawings for the entertainment of his children. Based on an exhibition at Harvard's Houghton Library and originally published as a special issue of the Harvard Library Bulletin, this volume offers an innovative view of the poet's personal life, his connection with his audience, and his efforts to add an international dimension to American literature. Profusely illustrated with manuscripts, drawings, and photographs from the extensive collections of Houghton Library and the Longfellow National Historic Site, it demonstrates how intensely involved Longfellow was in family, fatherhood, and friendship. It also shows how these supposedly "private" aspects of his life constantly intersected with the more public aspects of his understanding of authorship, his collaborative projects, and his commitment to his readers. The result is a vivid introduction to Longfellow's world.

Public Poet, Private Man: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200

University of Massachusetts Press

The Poetics of Natural History

Early American naturalists assembled dazzling collections of native flora and fauna, from John Bartram’s botanical garden in Philadelphia and the artful display of animals in Charles Willson Peale’s museum to P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, infamously characterized by Henry James as “halls of humbug.” Yet physical collections were only one of the myriad ways that these naturalists captured, catalogued, and commemorated America’s rich biodiversity. They also turned to writing and art, from John Edward Holbrook’s forays into the fascinating world of herpetology to John James Audubon’s masterful portraits of American birds. In this groundbreaking, now classic book, Christoph Irmscher argues that early American natural historians developed a distinctly poetic sensibility that allowed them to imagine themselves as part of, and not apart from, their environment. He also demonstrates what happens to such inclusiveness in the hands of Harvard scientist-turned Amazonian explorer Louis Agassiz, whose racist pseudoscience appalled his student William James. This expanded, full-color edition of The Poetics of Natural History features a preface and art from award-winning artist Rosamond Purcell and invites the reader to be fully immersed in an era when the boundaries between literature, art, and science became fluid.

Rutgers University Press Classics

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Irmscher, Christoph. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Irmscher, Christoph

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Irmscher, Christoph. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Longfellow Redux

Longfellow Redux

[RE]Imagining Science

Max Eastman: A Life

Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science

The Poetics of Natural History: From John Bartram to William James

Rosamond Purcell: Nature Stands Aside

Public Poet, Private Man: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at 200

The Poetics of Natural History

The Poetics of Natural History