Nineteenth-century American literature and the long Civil War / Cody Marrs, University of Georgia.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Marrs, Cody, author.

Series:

Cambridge studies in American literature and culture.

Cambridge studies in American literature and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--19th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

War and literature--United States--History--19th century.

War and literature.

War in literature.

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

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xii, 192 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Other Title:

Nineteenth-Century American Literature & the Long Civil War

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

American literature in the nineteenth century is often divided into two asymmetrical halves, neatly separated by the Civil War. In Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War, Cody Marrs argues that the war is a far more elastic boundary for literary history than has frequently been assumed. Focusing on the later writings of Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, this book shows how the war took imaginative shape across, and even beyond, the nineteenth century, inflecting literary forms and expressions for decades after 1865. These writers, Marrs demonstrates, are best understood not as antebellum or postbellum figures but as transbellum authors who cipher their later experiences through their wartime impressions and prewar ideals. This book is a bold, revisionary contribution to debates about temporality, periodization, and the shape of American literary history.

Contents:

Introduction: Transbellum American literature

Walt Whitman's dialectics

Frederick Douglass's revisions

Herman Melville's civil wars

Emily Dickinson's erasures

Coda: Other nineteenth centuries.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

ISBN:

1-316-34957-8

1-316-35557-8

1-316-36197-7

1-316-36397-X

1-316-36297-3

1-316-35857-7

1-316-36497-6

1-316-27210-9