Download Free A Southern Writer And The Civil War Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online A Southern Writer And The Civil War and write the review.

A “timely and essential” (New York Times Book Review) reconsideration of William Faulkner’s life and legacy that vitally asks, “How should we read Faulkner today?” With this “rich, complex, and eloquent” (Drew Gilpin Faust, Atlantic) work, Pulitzer Prize finalist Michael Gorra charts the evolution of an author through his most cherished—and contested—novels. Given the undeniable echoes of “Lost Cause” romanticism in William Faulkner’s fiction, as well as his depiction of Black characters and Black speech, Gorra argues convincingly that Faulkner demands a sobering reevaluation. Upending previous critical traditions and interweaving biography, literary criticism, and rich travelogue, the widely acclaimed The Saddest Words recontextualizes Faulkner, revealing a civil war within him, while examining the most plangent cultural issues facing American literature today.
"Gardner's reading of a wide range of published and unpublished texts recovers a multifaceted vision of the South. For example, during the war, while its outcome was not yet a foregone conclusion, women's writings sometimes reflected loyalty and optimism; at other times, they revealed doubts and a wavering resolve. According to Gardner, it was only in the aftermath of defeat that a more unified vision of the southern cause emerged. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, white women - who remained deeply loyal to their southern roots - were raising fundamental questions about the meaning of southern womanhood in the modern era."--BOOK JACKET.
A matchless account of the Battle of Gettysburg, drawn from Shelby Foote’s landmark history of the Civil War Shelby Foote’s monumental three-part chronicle, The Civil War: A Narrative, was hailed by Walker Percy as “an unparalleled achievement, an American Iliad, a unique work uniting the scholarship of the historian and the high readability of the first-class novelist.” Here is the central chapter of the central volume, and therefore the capstone of the arch, in a single volume. Complete with detailed maps, Stars in Their Courses brilliantly recreates the three-day conflict: It is a masterly treatment of a key great battle and the events that preceded it—not as legend has it but as it really was, before it became distorted by controversy and overblown by remembered glory.
Civil War Writing is a collection of new essays that focus on the most significant writing about the American Civil War by participants who lived through it, whether as civilians or combatants, southerners or northerners, women or men, blacks or whites. Collectively, as contributors show, these writings have sustained their influence over generations and include histories, memoirs, journals, novels, and one literary falsehood posing as an autobiographical narrative. Several of the works, such as William Tecumseh Sherman’s memoirs or Mary Chesnut’s diary, are familiar to scholars, but other accounts, including Charlotte Forten’s diary and Loreta Velasquez’s memoir, offer new material to even the most omnivorous Civil War reader. In all cases, a deeper look at these writings reveals why they continue to resonate with audiences more than 150 years after the end of the conflict. As supporting evidence for historical and biographical narratives and as deliberately designed communications, the writings discussed in this collection demonstrate considerable value. Whether exploring the differences among drafts and editions, listening closely to fluctuations in tone or voice, or tracing responses in private correspondence or published reviews, the essayists examine how authors wrote to different audiences and out of different motives, creating a complex literary record that offers rich potential for continuing evaluation of the country’s greatest national trauma. Overall, the essays in Civil War Writing underscore how participants employed various literary forms to record, describe, and explain aspects and episodes of a conflict that assumed proportions none of them imagined possible at the outset.
Historians of the American Civil War have debated a wide range of questions raised by the war and its outcome. None have been more vigorously argued as those surrounding its outcome. One of the leading explanations for Confederate defeat has been the argument that the Civil War South lacked a national identity. Related to and supporting this argument is the contention that the Civil War South failed to produce a distinct and vibrant literary culture. These contentions have been challenged by a growing body of literature which argues that the Civil War South did produce a sense of cultural and national identity. This book adds to this counter current through an examination of the Civil War experiences and writings of the Antebellum South's leading literary figure. Surprisingly, given William Gilmore Simms' well-known status prior to the war, his life and work during the course of the war itself has been understudied. This examination reveals the depth and extent to which Simms not only supported the Confederate war effort but how Simms conceptualized and articulated a vision of Confederate nationalism.
Co-edited by the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom, a collection of essays by fourteen distinguished historians discusses the ongoing effort to chronicle the Civil War and trends in Civil War scholarship. History Alt. UP.
“An extremely good writer, [Ayers] is well worth reading . . . on the South and Southern history.”—Stephen Sears, Boston Globe The Southern past has proven to be fertile ground for great works of history. Peculiarities of tragic proportions—a system of slavery flourishing in a land of freedom, secession and Civil War tearing at a federal Union, deep poverty persisting in a nation of fast-paced development—have fed the imaginations of some of our most accomplished historians. Foremost in their ranks today is Edward L. Ayers, author of the award-winning and ongoing study of the Civil War in the heart of America, the Valley of the Shadow Project. In wide-ranging essays on the Civil War, the New South, and the twentieth-century South, Ayers turns over the rich soil of Southern life to explore the sources of the nation's and his own history. The title essay, original here, distills his vast research and offers a fresh perspective on the nation's central historical event.
In this wide-ranging volume, eminent historians John David Smith and Raymond Arsenault assemble a distinguished group of scholars to build on the growing body of work on the "Long Civil War" and break new ground. They cover a variety of related subjects, including antebellum missionary activity and colonialism in Africa, the home front, the experiences of disabled veterans in the US Army Veteran Reserve Corps, and Dwight D. Eisenhower's personal struggles with the war's legacy amid the growing civil rights movement. The contributors offer fresh interpretations and challenging analyses of topics such as ritualistic suicide among former Confederates after the war and whitewashing in Walt Disney Studios' historical Cold War–era movies. Featuring many leading figures in the field, The Long Civil War meaningfully expands the focus of mid-nineteenth-century history as it was understood by previous generations of historians.
Kathryn B. McKee’s Reading Reconstruction situates Mississippi writer Katharine Sherwood Bonner McDowell (1849–1883) as an astute cultural observer throughout the 1870s and 1880s who portrayed the discord and uneasiness of the Reconstruction era in her fiction and nonfiction works. McKee reveals conflicts in Bonner’s writing as her newfound feminism clashes with her resurgent racism, two forces widely prevalent and persistently oppositional throughout the late nineteenth century. Reading Reconstruction begins by tracing the historical contexts that defined Bonner’s life in postwar Holly Springs. McKee explores how questions of race, gender, and national citizenship permeated Bonner’s social milieu and provided subject matter for her literary works. Examining Bonner’s writing across multiple genres, McKee finds that the author’s wry but dark humor satirizes the foibles and inconsistencies of southern culture. Bonner’s travel letters, first from Boston and then from the capitals of Europe, show her both embracing and performing her role as a southern woman, before coming to see herself as simply “American” when abroad. Like unto Like, the single novel she published in her lifetime, directly engages with Mississippi’s postbellum political life, especially its racial violence and the rise of Lost Cause ideology. Her two short story collections, including the raucously comic pieces in Dialect Tales and the more nostalgic Suwanee River Tales, indicate her consistent absorption in the debates of her time, as she ponders shifting definitions of citizenship, questions the evolving rhetoric of postwar reconciliation, and readily employs humor to disrupt conventional domestic scenarios and gender roles. In the end, Bonner’s writing offers a telling index of the paradoxes and irresolution of the period, advocating for a feminist reinterpretation of traditional gender hierarchies, but verging only reluctantly on the questions of racial equality that nonetheless unsettle her plots. By challenging traditional readings of postbellum southern literature, McKee offers a long-overdue reassessment of Sherwood Bonner’s place in American literary history.
Charles Dew’s Apostles of Disunion has established itself as a modern classic and an indispensable account of the Southern states’ secession from the Union. Addressing topics still hotly debated among historians and the public at large more than a century and a half after the Civil War, the book offers a compelling and clearly substantiated argument that slavery and race were at the heart of our great national crisis. The fifteen years since the original publication of Apostles of Disunion have seen an intensification of debates surrounding the Confederate flag and Civil War monuments. In a powerful new afterword to this anniversary edition, Dew situates the book in relation to these recent controversies and factors in the role of vast financial interests tied to the internal slave trade in pushing Virginia and other upper South states toward secession and war.