How the Civil War endures in American life through literature and culture. Recipient of the Eric Hoffer Award's Montaigne Medal The American Civil War lives on in our collective imagination like few other events. The story of the war has been retold in countless films, novels, poems, memoirs, plays, sculptures, and monuments. Often remembered as an emancipatory struggle, as an attempt to destroy slavery in America now and forever, it is also memorialized as a fight for Southern independence; as a fratricide that divided the national family; and as a dark, cruel conflict defined by its brutality. What do these stories, myths, and rumors have in common, and what do they teach us about modern America? In this fascinating book, Cody Marrs reveals how these narratives evolved over time and why they acquired such lasting power. Marrs addresses an eclectic range of texts, traditions, and creators, from Walt Whitman, Abram Ryan, and Abraham Lincoln to Margaret Mitchell, D. W. Griffith, and W. E. B. Du Bois. He also identifies several basic plots about the Civil War that anchor public memory and continually compete for cultural primacy. In other words, from the perspective of American cultural memory, there is no single Civil War. Whether they fill us with elation or terror; whether they side with the North or the South; whether they come from the 1860s, the 1960s, or today, these stories all make one thing vividly clear: the Civil War is an ongoing conflict, persisting not merely as a cultural touchstone but as an unresolved struggle through which Americans inevitably define themselves. A timely, evocative, and beautifully written book, Not Even Past is essential reading for anyone interested in the Civil War and its role in American history.

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.

A collection of engaging essays that seeks to uniquely reperiodize American literature. It is all but inevitable for literary history to be divided into periods. "Early American," "antebellum," "modern," "post-1945"-such designations organize our knowledge of the past and shape the ways we discuss that past today. These periods tend to align with the watershed moments in American history, even as the field has shifted its perspective away from the nation-state. It is high time we rethink these defining periods of American literary history, as the drawing of literary timelines is a necessary-even illuminating-practice. In these short, spirited, and imaginative essays, 23 leading Americanists gamely fashion new, unorthodox literary periods-from 600 B.C.E. to the present, from the Age of Van Buren to the Age of Microeconomics. They bring to light literary and cultural histories that have been obscured by traditional timelines and raise provocative questions. What is our definition of "modernism" if we imagine it stretching from 1865 to 1965 instead of 1890 to 1945? How does the captivity narrative change when we consider it as a contemporary, not just a "colonial," genre? What does the course of American literature look like set against the backdrop of federal denials of Native sovereignty or housing policies that exacerbated segregation? Filled with challenges to scholars, inspirations for teachers (anchored by an appendix of syllabi), and entry points for students, Timelines of American Literature gathers some of the most exciting new work in the field to showcase the revelatory potential of fresh thinking about how we organize the literary past.

A collection of engaging essays that seeks to uniquely reperiodize American literature. It is all but inevitable for literary history to be divided into periods. "Early American," "antebellum," "modern," "post-1945"-such designations organize our knowledge of the past and shape the ways we discuss that past today. These periods tend to align with the watershed moments in American history, even as the field has shifted its perspective away from the nation-state. It is high time we rethink these defining periods of American literary history, as the drawing of literary timelines is a necessary-even illuminating-practice. In these short, spirited, and imaginative essays, 23 leading Americanists gamely fashion new, unorthodox literary periods-from 600 B.C.E. to the present, from the Age of Van Buren to the Age of Microeconomics. They bring to light literary and cultural histories that have been obscured by traditional timelines and raise provocative questions. What is our definition of "modernism" if we imagine it stretching from 1865 to 1965 instead of 1890 to 1945? How does the captivity narrative change when we consider it as a contemporary, not just a "colonial," genre? What does the course of American literature look like set against the backdrop of federal denials of Native sovereignty or housing policies that exacerbated segregation? Filled with challenges to scholars, inspirations for teachers (anchored by an appendix of syllabi), and entry points for students, Timelines of American Literature gathers some of the most exciting new work in the field to showcase the revelatory potential of fresh thinking about how we organize the literary past.

What does Melville studies look like after a phase of intense critical activity? This book addresses that question by analyzing Melville as a writer who was keenly interested in the pleasures, limits, and possibilities of various reading practices. It collects and assesses all of the major new trends in Melville studies. Essays, written by some of the leading scholars in the field, test out emerging critical methods. They explore Melville's centrality to American literary studies and consider the full range of Melville's career, connecting his poetry to his prose. This collection re-imagines Melville as a theorist as well as a writer, approaching his works as philosophical forms in their own right. It shows how scholars are changing Melville studies not only by re-orienting the texts upon which those studies are based, but also by incorporating new approaches that unsettle prior assumptions and interpretive claims.

Between 1851 and 1877, the U.S. underwent a whirlwind of change. This volume offers a fresh account of this important era, assessing the many developments - both major and minor - that transformed American literature. In a wide range of chapters, scholars re-examine literary history before, during, and after the Civil War, revealing significant changes not only in how literature is written but also in how it is conceived, distributed, and consumed. Cutting across literary periods that are typically considered separate and distinct, and incorporating an array of methods and approaches, this volume discloses the Long Civil War to be an era of ongoing struggle and cultural contestation. It thus captures the dynamism of this period in American literary history as well as its ever-evolving field of study.

When people think about Herman Melville, they often think about experiences of madness, horror, and the sublime. But throughout his life, Melville was deeply and persistently interested in beauty. In this fascinating book, Cody Marrs retraces Melville's engagements with beauty and provides a revisionary account of Melville's philosophy, aesthetics, and literary career. In writings such as Moby-Dick, Timoleon, and Weeds and Wildings, Melville reflects on the nature, origins, and effects of beauty, and the ways in which beauty is inexorably bound up with considerations of religion, science, ecology, art, literature, and metaphysics. Melville's writing indicates that beauty is, ultimately, an experience of non-sovereignty, a felt recognition of the self's interdependence. In a series of fresh readings of Melville's works, ranging from the most to the least canonical, Marrs demonstrates how and why Melville developed this understanding of beauty, and the ways it resonates with recent scholarship on aesthetics, posthumanism, ecocriticism, materialism, and the means and methods of American literary studies. By recentring Melville's treatment of beauty and exploring its philosophical and scholarly implications, Marrs provides a new, evocative perspective on Melville as well as the broader field of American literary studies.