Angela Michele Leonard

Political Poetry as Discourse: Re-Reading John Greenleaf Whittier, Ebenezer Elliott & Hip-Hop-ology

"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."
—Frances Ferguson, Mary Elizabeth Garrett Chair in Arts and Sciences, Department of English, Johns Hopkins University

"Angela Leonard has written a new sort of book that combines a sophisticated analysis of nineteenth century protest literature in Britain and the United States with a method for making it meaningful to students today...She applies her textual method to the hip hop lyrics of contemporary rap artists to locate them as worth followers of radical writers who transform language as a tool in their struggle to transform society."
-- William A. Pencak, Professor of History and Jewish Studies, Penn State University