Fuller, Randall, 1963-
New York : Oxford University Press, 2011.
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Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references (p. [225]-243) and index.
- Introduction: Emerson’s dream — Beat! beat! drums! — Concord — Shiloh — Telling it slant — Port Royal — Fathers and sons — Phantom limbs — The man without a country — In a gloomy world — Heaven.
- Explores the profound impact of the war on writers including Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass. As the writers of the time grappled with the war’s impact on the individual and the national psyche, their responses multiplied and transmuted. Whitman’s poetry and prose, for example, was chastened and deepened by his years spent ministering to wounded soldiers off the battlefield, the anguish of war would come to suffuse the austere, elliptical poems that Emily Dickinson was writing and Hawthorne was rendered silent by his reading of military reports and talks with soldiers. Calling into question every prior presumption and ideal, the war forever changed America’s early idealism–and consequently its literature–into something far more ambivalent and raw.
Subjects:
- American literature — 19th century — History and criticism.
- United States — History — Civil War, 1861-1865 — Literature and the war.
- War and literature — Southern States — History — 19th century.
- Nationalism in literature.
- United States — In literature.
Requested by Koehler, B & Wanyama, M