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result(s) for
"United States History Civil War, 1861-1865 Literature and the war."
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Soldier song : a true story of the Civil War
Provides an account of the important role of songs in rallying Union and Confederate troops during the American Civil War.
Book
Ambrose Bierce and the Dance of Death
Ambrose Bierce and the Dance of Death uses
psychoanalytic theory in combination with historical, cultural,
and literary contexts to examine the complex motif of death in
a full range of Bierce’s writings. Scholarly interest in
Bierce, whose work has long been undervalued, has grown
significantly in recent years. This new book contributes to the
ongoing reassessment by providing new contexts for joining the
texts in his canon in meaningful ways. Previous attempts to
consider Bierce from a psychological perspective have been
superficial, often reductive Freudian readings of individual
stories such as “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”
and “The Death of Halpin Frayser.” This new volume
not only updates these interpretations with insights from
post-Freudian theorists but uses contemporary death theory as a
framework to analyze the sources and expressions of
Bierce’s attitudes about death and dying. This approach
makes it possible to discern links among texts that resolve
some of the still puzzling ambiguities that have—until
now—precluded a fuller understanding of both the man and
his writings. Lively and engaging,
Ambrose Bierce and the Dance of Death adds valuable
new insights not only to the study of Bierce but to that of
nineteenth-century American literature in general.
eBook
Southern Women Novelists and the Civil War
During and after the Civil War, southern women played a
critical role in shaping the South’s evolving collective
memory by penning journals and diaries, historical accounts,
memoirs, and literary interpretations of the war. While a few of
these writings—most notably Mary Chesnut’s diaries
and Margaret Mitchell’s novel,
Gone with the Wind —have been studied in depth by
numerous scholars, until now there has been no comprehensive
examination of Civil War novels by southern women. In this
welcome study, Sharon Talley explores works by fifteen such
writers, illuminating the role that southern women played in
fashioning cultural identity in the region. Beginning with
Augusta Jane Evans’s Macaria and Sallie Rochester
Ford’s
Raids and Romance of Morgan and His Men , which were
published as the war still raged, Talley offers a chronological
consideration of the novels with informative introductions for
each time period. She examines Reconstruction works by Marion
Harland, Mary Ann Cruse, and Rebecca Harding Davis, novels of the
“Redeemed” South and the turn of the century by Mary
Noailles Murfree, Ellen Glasgow, and Mary Johnston, and
narratives by Evelyn Scott, Margaret Mitchell, and Caroline
Gordon from the Modern period that spanned the two World Wars.
Analysis of Margaret Walker’s
Jubilee (1966), the first critically acclaimed Civil War
novel by an African American woman of the South, as well as other
post–World War II works by Kaye Gibbons, Josephine
Humphreys, and Alice Randall, offers a fitting conclusion to
Talley’s study by addressing the inaccuracies in the
romantic myth of the Old South that
Gone with the Wind most famously engraved on the
nation’s consciousness. Informed by feminist,
poststructural, and cultural studies theory, Talley’s close
readings of these various novels ultimately refute the notion of
a monolithic interpretation of the Civil War, presenting instead
unique and diverse approaches to balancing “fact” and
“fiction” in the long period of artistic production
concerning this singular traumatic event in American history.
Sharon Talley, professor of English at Texas A&M
University–Corpus Christi, is the author of
Ambrose Bierce and the Dance of Death and
Student Companion to Herman Melville . Her articles have
appeared in
American Imago, Journal of Men’s Studies, and
Nineteenth-Century Prose.
eBook
To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave
Focusing on literary and popular poets, as well as work by women, African Americans, and soldiers, this book considers how writers used poetry to articulate their relationships to family, community, and nation during the Civil War. Faith Barrett suggests that the nationalist “we” and the personal “I” are not opposed in this era; rather they are related positions on a continuous spectrum of potential stances. For example, while Julia Ward Howe became famous for her “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” in an earlier poem titled “The Lyric I” she struggles to negotiate her relationship to domestic, aesthetic, and political stances. Barrett makes the case that Americans on both sides of the struggle believed that poetry had an important role to play in defining national identity. She considers how poets created a platform from which they could speak both to their own families and local communities and to the nations of the Confederacy, the Union, and the United States. She argues that the Civil War changed the way American poets addressed their audiences and that Civil War poetry changed the way Americans understood their relationship to the nation.
eBook
Life and Limb
The contemporary perspectives – fiction, first-hand accounts, reportage and photographs - found in the pages of this collection give a unique insight into the experiences and suffering of those affected by the American Civil War. The essays and recollections detail some of the earliest attempts by medical professionals to understand and help the wounded, and look at how writers and poets were influenced by their own involvement as nurses, combatants and observers. So alongside the medical observations of figures such as Silas Weir Mitchell and William Keen, you’ll find memoirs of writers including Louisa May Alcott, Ambrose Bierce and Walt Whitman. By presenting the wide range of frequently traumatic experiences by writers, medical staff, and of course the often ignored common foot soldiers on both sides, this volume will complement the older emphasis on military history and will appeal to readers of the evolution of medicine, of the literature the time, of social anthropology, and of the whole complex issue of how the war was represented and debated from many different perspectives. While a century and a half of developments in medicine, social care and science mean that the level of support and technology available to amputees is now incomparable to that in the mid-nineteenth century, the insights into the lives and thoughts of those devastated by psychological traumas, complex emotions and difficulties in adjusting to life after limb loss remain just as relevant today. Phenomena explored in the book, such as ‘Phantom Limb Syndrome’, continue to be the subject of medical and academic research in the twenty-first century.
eBook
The tangled web of the Civil War and Reconstruction
This unique collection of writings by the celebrated author David Madden provides a multitude of reflections on the Civil War and Reconstruction, from nonfiction to fiction.Included are Madden's examination of key works by historians James McPherson and Fletcher Pratt, the story of the effort to simultaneously burn nine bridges by nine unionist.
eBook