Southern Women Novelists And The Civil War

Author : Sharon Talley
Publisher : Univ. of Tennessee Press
Page : 457 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2014-04-09
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9781621900139

Get Book

Southern Women Novelists and the Civil War by Sharon Talley Pdf

During and after the Civil War, southern women played a critical role in shaping the South’s evolving collective memory by penning journals and diaries, historical accounts, memoirs, and literary interpretations of the war. While a few of these writings—most notably Mary Chesnut’s diaries and Margaret Mitchell’s novel, Gone with the Wind—have been studied in depth by numerous scholars, until now there has been no comprehensive examination of Civil War novels by southern women. In this welcome study, Sharon Talley explores works by fifteen such writers, illuminating the role that southern women played in fashioning cultural identity in the region. Beginning with Augusta Jane Evans’s Macaria and Sallie Rochester Ford’s Raids and Romance of Morgan and His Men, which were published as the war still raged, Talley offers a chronological consideration of the novels with informative introductions for each time period. She examines Reconstruction works by Marion Harland, Mary Ann Cruse, and Rebecca Harding Davis, novels of the “Redeemed” South and the turn of the century by Mary Noailles Murfree, Ellen Glasgow, and Mary Johnston, and narratives by Evelyn Scott, Margaret Mitchell, and Caroline Gordon from the Modern period that spanned the two World Wars. Analysis of Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), the first critically acclaimed Civil War novel by an African American woman of the South, as well as other post–World War II works by Kaye Gibbons, Josephine Humphreys, and Alice Randall, offers a fitting conclusion to Talley’s study by addressing the inaccuracies in the romantic myth of the Old South that Gone with the Wind most famously engraved on the nation’s consciousness. Informed by feminist, poststructural, and cultural studies theory, Talley’s close readings of these various novels ultimately refute the notion of a monolithic interpretation of the Civil War, presenting instead unique and diverse approaches to balancing “fact” and “fiction” in the long period of artistic production concerning this singular traumatic event in American history. Sharon Talley, professor of English at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi, is the author of Ambrose Bierce and the Dance of Death and Student Companion to Herman Melville. Her articles have appeared in American Imago, Journal of Men’s Studies, and Nineteenth-Century Prose.

Author : Carolyn Perry,Mary Weaks-Baxter
Publisher : LSU Press
Page : 724 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2002-03-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0807127531

Get Book

The History of Southern Women's Literature by Carolyn Perry,Mary Weaks-Baxter Pdf

Many of America’s foremost, and most beloved, authors are also southern and female: Mary Chesnut, Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, Maya Angelou, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, and Lee Smith, to name several. Designating a writer as “southern” if her work reflects the region’s grip on her life, Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks have produced an invaluable guide to the richly diverse and enduring tradition of southern women’s literature. Their comprehensive history—the first of its kind in a relatively young field—extends from the pioneer woman to the career woman, embracing black and white, poor and privileged, urban and Appalachian perspectives and experiences. The History of Southern Women’s Literature allows readers both to explore individual authors and to follow the developing arc of various genres across time. Conduct books and slave narratives; Civil War diaries and letters; the antebellum, postbellum, and modern novel; autobiography and memoirs; poetry; magazine and newspaper writing—these and more receive close attention. Over seventy contributors are represented here, and their essays discuss a wealth of women’s issues from four centuries: race, urbanization, and feminism; the myth of southern womanhood; preset images and assigned social roles—from the belle to the mammy—and real life behind the facade of meeting others’ expectations; poverty and the labor movement; responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the influence of Gone with the Wind. The history of southern women’s literature tells, ultimately, the story of the search for freedom within an “insidious tradition,” to quote Ellen Glasgow. This teeming volume validates the deep contributions and pleasures of an impressive body of writing and marks a major achievement in women’s and literary studies.

Author : Mary Weaks-Baxter,Carolyn Perry
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 417 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 1995
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0813014115

Get Book

Southern Women's Writing by Mary Weaks-Baxter,Carolyn Perry Pdf

Discusses the lives of major southern women authors and presents an example of the work of each.

Author : Sarah E. Gardner
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : History
ISBN : 080785767X

Get Book

Blood & Irony by Sarah E. Gardner Pdf

"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.

Author : Steven M. Stowe
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2018-04-02
Category : History
ISBN : 9781469640976

Get Book

Keep the Days by Steven M. Stowe Pdf

Americans wrote fiercely during the Civil War. War surprised, devastated, and opened up imagination, taking hold of Americans' words as well as their homes and families. The personal diary—wildly ragged yet rooted in day following day—was one place Americans wrote their war. Diaries, then, have become one of the best-known, most-used sources for exploring the life of the mind in a war-torn place and time. Delving into several familiar wartime diaries kept by women of the southern slave-owning class, Steven Stowe recaptures their motivations to keep the days close even as war tore apart the brutal system of slavery that had benefited them. Whether the diarists recorded thoughts about themselves, their opinions about men, or their observations about slavery, race, and warfare, Stowe shows how these women, by writing the immediate moment, found meaning in a changing world. In studying the inner lives of these unsympathetic characters, Stowe also explores the importance—and the limits—of historical empathy as a condition for knowing the past, demonstrating how these plain, first-draft texts can offer new ways to make sense of the world in which these Confederate women lived.

Author : Caroline E. Janney
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2012-02-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0807882704

Get Book

Burying the Dead but Not the Past by Caroline E. Janney Pdf

Immediately after the Civil War, white women across the South organized to retrieve the remains of Confederate soldiers. In Virginia alone, these Ladies' Memorial Associations (LMAs) relocated and reinterred the remains of more than 72,000 soldiers. Challenging the notion that southern white women were peripheral to the Lost Cause movement until the 1890s, Caroline Janney restores these women as the earliest creators and purveyors of Confederate tradition. Long before national groups such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the United Daughters of the Confederacy were established, Janney shows, local LMAs were earning sympathy for defeated Confederates. Her exploration introduces new ways in which gender played a vital role in shaping the politics, culture, and society of the late nineteenth-century South.

Author : Lisa . Tendrich Frank
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 775 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2007-12-03
Category : History
ISBN : 9781851096053

Get Book

Women in the American Civil War [2 volumes] by Lisa . Tendrich Frank Pdf

This fascinating work tells the untold story of the role of women in the Civil War, from battlefield to home front. Most Americans can name famous generals and notable battles from the Civil War. With rare exception, they know neither the women of that war nor their part in it. Yet, as this encyclopedia demonstrates, women played a critical role. The book's 400 A–Z entries focus on specific people, organizations, issues, and battles, and a dozen contextual essays provide detailed information about the social, political, and family issues that shaped women's lives during the Civil War era. Women in the American Civil War satisfies a growing interest in this topic. Readers will learn how the Civil War became a vehicle for expanding the role of women in society. Representing the work of more than 100 scholars, this book treats in depth all aspects of the previously untold story of women in the Civil War.

Author : Jonathan Daniel Wells
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2011-10-24
Category : History
ISBN : 9781139503495

Get Book

Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South by Jonathan Daniel Wells Pdf

The first study to focus on white and black women journalists and writers both before and after the Civil War, this book offers fresh insight into Southern intellectual life, the fight for women's rights and gender ideology. Based on new research into Southern magazines and newspapers, this book seeks to shift scholarly attention away from novelists and toward the rich and diverse periodical culture of the South between 1820 and 1900. Magazines were of central importance to the literary culture of the South because the region lacked the publishing centers that could produce large numbers of books. As editors, contributors, correspondents and reporters in the nineteenth century, Southern women entered traditionally male bastions when they embarked on careers in journalism. In so doing, they opened the door to calls for greater political and social equality at the turn of the twentieth century.

Author : Sharon Talley
Publisher : Univ Tennessee Press
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2020-09-25
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1621905977

Get Book

Women's Diaries from the Civil War South by Sharon Talley Pdf

"Traditionally, narratives of war have been male," Sharon Talley writes. In the pages that follow, she goes on to disrupt this tradition, offering close readings and comparative studies of fourteen women's diaries from the Civil War era that illuminate women's experiences in the Confederacy during the war. While other works highlighting individual diaries exist--and Talley notes that there has been a virtual explosion of published primary sources by women in recent years--this is the first effort of comprehensive synthesis of women's Civil War diaries to attempt to characterize them as a distinct genre. Deeply informed by autobiographical theory, as well as literary and social history, Talley's presentation of multiple diaries from women of differing backgrounds illuminates complexities and disparities across female wartime experiences rather than perpetuating overgeneralizations gleaned from a single diary or preconceived ideas about what these diaries contain. To facilitate this comparative approach, Talley divides her study into six sections that are organized by location, vocation, and purpose: diaries of elite planter women; diaries of women on the Texas frontier; diaries of women on the Confederate border; diaries of espionage by women in the South; diaries of women nurses near the battlefront; and diaries of women missionaries in the Port Royal Experiment. When read together, these writings illustrate that the female experience in the Civil War South was not one but many. Women's Diaries from the Civil War South: A Literary-Historical Reading is an essential text for scholars in women's studies, autobiography studies, and Civil War studies alike, presenting an in-depth and multifaceted look at how the Civil War reshaped women's lives in the South--and how their diverse responses shaped the course of the war in return.

Author : Drew Gilpin Faust
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2004-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0807855731

Get Book

Mothers of Invention by Drew Gilpin Faust Pdf

Exploring privileged Confederate women's wartime experiences, this book chronicles the clash of the old and the new within a group that was at once the beneficiary and the victim of the social order of the Old South.

Author : Sarah E. Gardner
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9798890873026

Get Book

Blood and Irony by Sarah E. Gardner Pdf

Author : Elizabeth Young
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 410 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 1999-12-15
Category : History
ISBN : 0226960889

Get Book

Disarming the Nation by Elizabeth Young Pdf

In a study that will radically shift our understanding of Civil War literature, Elizabeth Young shows that American women writers have been profoundly influenced by the Civil War and that, in turn, their works have contributed powerfully to conceptions of the war and its aftermath. Offering fascinating reassessments of works by white writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and Margaret Mitchell and African-American writers including Elizabeth Keckley, Frances Harper, and Margaret Walker, Young also highlights crucial but lesser-known texts such as the memoirs of women who masqueraded as soldiers. In each case she explores the interdependence of gender with issues of race, sexuality, region, and nation. Combining literary analysis, cultural history, and feminist theory, Disarming the Nation argues that the Civil War functioned in women's writings to connect female bodies with the body politic. Women writers used the idea of "civil war" as a metaphor to represent struggles between and within women—including struggles against the cultural prescriptions of "civility." At the same time, these writers also reimagined the nation itself, foregrounding women in their visions of America at war and in peace. In a substantial afterword, Young shows how contemporary black and white women—including those who crossdress in Civil War reenactments—continue to reshape the meanings of the war in ways startlingly similar to their nineteenth-century counterparts. Learned, witty, and accessible, Disarming the Nation provides fresh and compelling perspectives on the Civil War, women's writing, and the many unresolved "civil wars" within American culture today.

Author : Lyde Cullen Sizer
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
Page : 367 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2003-06-19
Category : History
ISBN : 9780807860984

Get Book

The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850-1872 by Lyde Cullen Sizer Pdf

This volume explores the lives and works of nine Northern women who wrote during the Civil War period, examining the ways in which, through their writing, they engaged in the national debates of the time. Lyde Sizer shows that from the 1850 publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin through Reconstruction, these women, as well as a larger mosaic of lesser-known writers, used their mainstream writings publicly to make sense of war, womanhood, Union, slavery, republicanism, heroism, and death. Among the authors discussed are Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sara Willis Parton (Fanny Fern), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth, Mary Abigail Dodge (Gail Hamilton), Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Although direct political or partisan power was denied to women, these writers actively participated in discussions of national issues through their sentimental novels, short stories, essays, poetry, and letters to the editor. Sizer pays close attention to how these mostly middle-class women attempted to create a "rhetoric of unity," giving common purpose to women despite differences in class, race, and politics. This theme of unity was ultimately deployed to establish a white middle-class standard of womanhood, meant to exclude as well as include.

Author : Daniel Krebs,Lorien Foote
Publisher : University Press of Kansas
Page : 342 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2021-02-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9780700630516

Get Book

Useful Captives by Daniel Krebs,Lorien Foote Pdf

Useful Captives: The Role of POWs in American Military Conflicts is a wide-ranging investigation of the integral role prisoners of war (POWs) have played in the economic, cultural, political, and military aspects of American warfare. In Useful Captives volume editors Daniel Krebs and Lorien Foote and their contributors explore the wide range of roles that captives play in times of conflict: hostages used to negotiate vital points of contention between combatants, consumers, laborers, propaganda tools, objects of indoctrination, proof of military success, symbols, political instruments, exemplars of manhood ideals, loyal and disloyal soldiers, and agents of change in society. The book’s eleven chapters cover conflicts involving Americans, ranging from colonial warfare on the Creek-Georgia border in the late eighteenth century, the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Great War, World War II, to twenty-first century U.S. drone warfare. This long historical horizon enables the reader to go beyond the prison camp experience of POWs to better understand the many ways they influence the nature and course of military conflict. Useful Captives shows the vital role that prisoners of war play in American warfare and reveals the cultural contexts of warfare, the shaping and altering of military policies, the process of state-building, the impacts upon the economy and environment of the conflict zone, their special place in propaganda and political symbolism, and the importance of public history in shaping national memory.

Author : Sara Agnes Rice Pryor
Publisher : e-artnow
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2019-06-03
Category : History
ISBN : EAN:4057664189103

Get Book

Reminiscences of Peace and War (Illustrated Edition) by Sara Agnes Rice Pryor Pdf

Reminiscences of Peace and War is a book based on author's journals which is intended to contribute to public discourse about the Civil War. In this book Mrs. Pryor wrote about antebellum society but also defended the Confederacy, as did fellow writers Virginia Clay-Clopton and Louise Wigfall Wright; the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) recommended the works of these three for serious studies by other women.