Books by Betsy Erkkila

Brings together a rich collection of Betsy Erkkila's phenomenally influential essays that have been published over the years, along with two powerful new essays. Erkkila offers a moving account of the inseparable mix of the spiritual-sexual-political in Whitman and the absolute centrality of male-male connection to his work and thinking.

In this series of essays Betsy Erkkila considers the historical and psychological dramas of blood-as marker of violence, race, sex, kinship-that have stood near the center of American literature, culture, and politics since the eighteenth century.