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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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.
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