Literary Cultures of the Civil War edited by Timothy Sweet.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Sweet, Timothy, 1960- editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

War in literature.

American literature--History and criticism.

American literature.

War and literature--United States--History.

War and literature.

United States--History--Civil War, 1861-1865--Literature and the war.

United States.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (286 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Manufacture:

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2016

Place of Publication:

Athens : The University of Georgia Press, 2016.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Addressing texts produced by writers who lived through the Civil War and wrote about it before the end of Reconstruction, this collection explores the literary cultures of that unsettled moment when memory of the war had yet to be overwritten by later impulses of reunion, reconciliation, or Lost Cause revisionism. The Civil War reshaped existing literary cultures or enabled new ones. Ensembles of discourses, conventions, and practices, these cultures offered fresh ways of engaging a host of givens about American character and values that the war called into question. The volume's contributors look at how literary cultures of the 1860s and 1870s engaged concepts of nation, violence, liberty, citizenship, community, and identity. At the same time, the essayists analyze the cultures themselves, which included Euroamerican and African American vernacular oral, manuscript (journals and letters), and print (newspapers, magazines, or books) cultures; overlapping discourses of politics, protest, domesticity, and sentiment; unsettled literary nationalism and emergent literary regionalism; and vernacular and elite aesthetic traditions. These essays point to the variety of literary voices that were speaking out in the war's immediate aftermath and help us understand what those voices were saying and how it was received.

Contents:

Cover; Half Title; Title; Copyright; CONTENTS; LIST OF FIGURES; ACKNOWLEDGMENTS; Introduction: Shaping the Civil War Canon; I. African American Literary Cultures; "if we Ever Expect to be a Pepple": The Epistolary Culture of African American Soldiers; The Color of Quaintness: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Black Song, and American Union; The Negro in the American Rebellion: William Wells Brown and the Design of African American History; "Naked Genius": The Civil War Poems of George Moses Horton; II. Poetics of War; Melville's Battle-Pieces and Vernacular Poetics

"Help'd, Braced, Concentrated": Transatlantic Tensions and Whitman's National War PoetrySurplus Patriotism: William Gilmore Simms's War Poetry of the South and the Afterlife of Confederate Literary Nationalism; III. Mediations of Nation and Region; Traces of the Confederacy: Soldier Newspapers and Wartime Printing in the Occupied South; The Turn against Sentiment: Kate Cumming and Confederate Realism; Mourning and Substitution in The Gates Ajar; "Near Andersonville": Place and Race in Early American Regionalism

Emancipation and Grizzly Reckoning: The Advent of Photography, California's Overland Monthly, and the Model of ParallaxCONTRIBUTORS; INDEX; A; B; C; D; E; F; G; H; J; K; L; M; N; O; P; Q; R; S; T; U; V; W; Y

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-8203-4959-3

OCLC:

953602539