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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      Book details

      Publisher Cambridge University Press
      Published 7/22/2015 12:00:00 AM
      ISBN-13 9781107109834
      978-1107109834
      ISBN-10 1107109833
      Also in:
      Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 Civil wars Specific wars and military campaigns

      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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