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Literary Cultures of the Civil War

By Timothy Sweet & Samuel Graber &
Literary Cultures of the Civil War by Timothy Sweet & Samuel Graber &  digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

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.

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About Timothy Sweet

TIMOTHY SWEET is the Eberly Family Professor of American Literature at West Virginia University. He is the author of American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature and Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union.

Coleman Hutchison

COLEMAN HUTCHISON is an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.

Other books by Coleman Hutchison

Jillian Spivey Caddell

Faith Barrett

Kathleen Diffley

KATHLEEN DIFFLEY is professor emerita at the University of Iowa and director of the Civil War Caucus at the M/MLA. She is the author of Where My Heart Is Turning Ever: Civil War Stories and Constitutional Reform, 1861–1876 and the coeditor of Visions of Glory: The Civil War in Word and Image (both Georgia). She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

Christopher Hager

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