Political Poetry as Discourse

Angela Michele Leonard is tenured professor of history at Loyola College in Maryland

• Chapter 1 IntroductionChapter 2 Theoretical OverviewChapter 3 Discourse of the British Anti-Corn Law Movement in the Sheffield Independent, 1825-1835Chapter 4 From Newstexts to Poetry: The Sheffield Independent & Ebenezer Eliott's Protest PoemsChapter 5 "Mining a Small Town Newspaper Unearthing Negro Colonizationist Ideology in the Haverhill Gazette and Essex Patriot (MA), 1824-1827"Chapter 6 The Topography of Violence in John Greenleaf Whittier's "Antislavery Poems"Chapter 7 Hijacking and Pro-creating Signifiers: Extending Discourse Analysis to Pedagogy and the Value of HiphopologyChapter 8 Conclusion

Angela Leonard's Political Poetry as Discourse confronts the past for the purposes of the present with an account of the discourse networks which political poetry engages and seeks to reconfigure. Leonard analyzes the poetry of Ebenezer Elliott (the English Corn Law Rhymer) and John Greenleaf Whittier (the American abolitionist) to identify the semiotic dynamics that created a class position for the working poor of nineteenth-century England and that ignored differences among black Americans and amalgamated them under the category of slave in nineteenth-century America. Drawing on Elliott and Whittier's examples for subverting established codes, Leonard advocates teaching that analyzes hip-hop and embraces service learning to help students identify and transform their society. This is a work of seriously engaged scholarship.