The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865

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Univ of North Carolina Press, 2010 M03 15 - 424 páginas
In this groundbreaking work of cultural history, Alice Fahs explores a little-known and fascinating side of the Civil War--the outpouring of popular literature inspired by the conflict. From 1861 to 1865, authors and publishers in both the North and the South produced a remarkable variety of war-related compositions, including poems, songs, children's stories, romances, novels, histories, and even humorous pieces. Fahs mines these rich but long-neglected resources to recover the diversity of the war's political and social meanings.

Instead of narrowly portraying the Civil War as a clash between two great, white armies, popular literature offered a wide range of representations of the conflict and helped shape new modes of imagining the relationships of diverse individuals to the nation. Works that explored the war's devastating impact on white women's lives, for example, proclaimed the importance of their experiences on the home front, while popular writings that celebrated black manhood and heroism in the wake of emancipation helped readers begin to envision new roles for blacks in American life.

Recovering a lost world of popular literature, The Imagined Civil War adds immeasurably to our understanding of American life and letters at a pivotal point in our history.

 

Contenido

Introduction
1
1 Popular Literary Culture in Wartime
17
2 The Early Spirit of War
61
3 The Sentimental Soldier
93
4 The Feminized War
120
The Emancipation of Popular Literature
150
6 The Humor of War
195
7 The Sensational War
225
8 A Boys and Girls War
256
Histories of the War
287
Epilogue
311
Notes
319
Bibliography
365
Index
393
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Alice Fahs is associate professor of history at the University of California, Irvine.

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