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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.
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.
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.
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