Description

Book Synopsis
American literature in the nineteenth century is often divided into two asymmetrical halves, neatly separated by the Civil War. In Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War, Cody Marrs argues that the war is a far more elastic boundary for literary history than has frequently been assumed. Focusing on the later writings of Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, this book shows how the war took imaginative shape across, and even beyond, the nineteenth century, inflecting literary forms and expressions for decades after 1865. These writers, Marrs demonstrates, are best understood not as antebellum or postbellum figures but as transbellum authors who cipher their later experiences through their wartime impressions and prewar ideals. This book is a bold, revisionary contribution to debates about temporality, periodization, and the shape of American literary history.

Table of Contents
1. Walt Whitman's dialectics; 2. Frederick Douglass's revisions; 3. Herman Melville's Civil Wars; 4. Emily Dickinson's erasures.

NineteenthCentury American Literature and the Long Civil War 174 Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture Series Number 174

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    A Hardback by Cody Marrs

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      View other formats and editions of NineteenthCentury American Literature and the Long Civil War 174 Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture Series Number 174 by Cody Marrs

      Publisher: Cambridge University Press
      Publication Date: 7/22/2015 12:00:00 AM
      ISBN13: 9781107109834, 978-1107109834
      ISBN10: 1107109833

      Description

      Book Synopsis
      American literature in the nineteenth century is often divided into two asymmetrical halves, neatly separated by the Civil War. In Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War, Cody Marrs argues that the war is a far more elastic boundary for literary history than has frequently been assumed. Focusing on the later writings of Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, this book shows how the war took imaginative shape across, and even beyond, the nineteenth century, inflecting literary forms and expressions for decades after 1865. These writers, Marrs demonstrates, are best understood not as antebellum or postbellum figures but as transbellum authors who cipher their later experiences through their wartime impressions and prewar ideals. This book is a bold, revisionary contribution to debates about temporality, periodization, and the shape of American literary history.

      Table of Contents
      1. Walt Whitman's dialectics; 2. Frederick Douglass's revisions; 3. Herman Melville's Civil Wars; 4. Emily Dickinson's erasures.

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