Kathleen Diffley - Böcker

The Fateful Lightning is the second volume of Kathleen Diffley’s trilogy on Civil War magazine fiction. While her first book of the trilogy, Where My Heart Is Turning Ever, charted the role of magazine fiction from the Northeast in “grounding the rites of citizenship” following the end of the Civil War, The Fateful Lightning traces the sectional conflicts in a postwar nation and how region shaped the political agendas of these postwar editorials. Diffley argues that the journals she examines present stories that give unpredictable results of sectional conflict and commemorate the Civil War differently from the northeastern publishing establishments. She weaves this argument through her analysis of four literary journals: Baltimore’s Southern Magazine, Charlotte’s The Land We Love, Chicago’s Lakeside Monthly, and San Francisco’s Overland Monthly. Diffley uses a method of literary analysis that looks at what is not only present in the text but also present throughout its historically informed context, gleaning cultural meanings from what the stories also filter out. Coupling this literary analysis with city studies, Diffley’s innovative approach demonstrates how these editorials offer varying gauges of continued political unrest, rising social opportunity, and conflicting commemorative investments as Reconstruction began to unfold.

The Fateful Lightning is the second volume of Kathleen Diffley’s trilogy on Civil War magazine fiction. While her first book of the trilogy, Where My Heart Is Turning Ever, charted the role of magazine fiction from the Northeast in “grounding the rites of citizenship” following the end of the Civil War, The Fateful Lightning traces the sectional conflicts in a postwar nation and how region shaped the political agendas of these postwar editorials. Diffley argues that the journals she examines present stories that give unpredictable results of sectional conflict and commemorate the Civil War differently from the northeastern publishing establishments. She weaves this argument through her analysis of four literary journals: Baltimore’s Southern Magazine, Charlotte’s The Land We Love, Chicago’s Lakeside Monthly, and San Francisco’s Overland Monthly. Diffley uses a method of literary analysis that looks at what is not only present in the text but also present throughout its historically informed context, gleaning cultural meanings from what the stories also filter out. Coupling this literary analysis with city studies, Diffley’s innovative approach demonstrates how these editorials offer varying gauges of continued political unrest, rising social opportunity, and conflicting commemorative investments as Reconstruction began to unfold.

The eighteen essays in this volume explore Constance Fenimore Woolson’s prodigious range in period and genre as well as place, from the Great Lakes to the defeated South and across storied Europe to the Mediterranean. The whole of her professional life comes alive in this enlightening collection’s triptych.The first section, “A Writer’s Experiments,” reveals that Woolson’s play with familiar genres and unfamiliar characters began during the 1870s and extended until she died in 1894. Consistently, she tested the limits of representing women’s labor and their erotic desires.The second section, “Postbellum Souths,” follows Woolson’s travels through a land ravaged by war and injustice. Drawing on theories of travel, collective memory, the Lost Cause, religious controversy, and a race-bound region, these essays expose both the smugness of visitors and the agendas of residents that Woolson was among the first postwar writers to portray.The third section, “Through an International Lens,” considers expatriate perceptions of European and Mediterranean cultures as well as misconceptions about the Gilded Age United States. Here and throughout this volume, responses to Woolson’s travel sketches mingle with assessments of her fiction and poetry, while her encounters with the writing of other Americans demonstrate how regularly Woolson made her century’s literary terrain more subtle and complex.

The eighteen essays in this volume explore Constance Fenimore Woolson’s prodigious range in period and genre as well as place, from the Great Lakes to the defeated South and across storied Europe to the Mediterranean. The whole of her professional life comes alive in this enlightening collection’s triptych.The first section, “A Writer’s Experiments,” reveals that Woolson’s play with familiar genres and unfamiliar characters began during the 1870s and extended until she died in 1894. Consistently, she tested the limits of representing women’s labor and their erotic desires.The second section, “Postbellum Souths,” follows Woolson’s travels through a land ravaged by war and injustice. Drawing on theories of travel, collective memory, the Lost Cause, religious controversy, and a race-bound region, these essays expose both the smugness of visitors and the agendas of residents that Woolson was among the first postwar writers to portray.The third section, “Through an International Lens,” considers expatriate perceptions of European and Mediterranean cultures as well as misconceptions about the Gilded Age United States. Here and throughout this volume, responses to Woolson’s travel sketches mingle with assessments of her fiction and poetry, while her encounters with the writing of other Americans demonstrate how regularly Woolson made her century’s literary terrain more subtle and complex.

Even before the first cannonballs were fired at Fort Sumter, American writers were trying to make creative sense of the War Between the States. These thirty-one stories were culled from hundreds that circulated in popular magazines between 1861 and the celebration of the American centennial in 1876. Arranged to echo the sequence of the unfolding drama of the war and Reconstruction, together these short stories constitute an “inadvertent novel,” a collective narrative about a domestic crisis that was still ongoing as the stories were being written and published.The authors, who include Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain, depict the horrors of the battlefield, the suffering in prison camps and field hospitals, and the privations of the home front. In these pages, bushwhackers carry the war to out-of-the-way homesteads, spies work households from the inside, journeying paymasters rely on the kindness of border women, and soldiers turn out to be girls. The stories are populated with nurses, officers, speculators, preachers, slaves, and black troops, and they take place in cities, along the frontier, and on battlefields from Shiloh to Gettysburg.The book opens with a prewar vigilante attack on the Underground Railroad and a Kansas parson in Henry King’s “The Cabin at Pharoah’s Ford” and concludes with an ex-slave recalling the loss of her remaining son in Twain’s “A True Story.” In between are stories written by both women and men that were published in magazines from the South and West as well as the culturally dominant Northeast. Wartime wood engravings highlight the text. Kathleen Diffley’s introduction provides literary and historical background, and her commentary introduces readers to magazine authors as well as the deepening disruptions of a country at war. Just as they did for nineteenth-century readers, these stories will bring the war home to contemporary readers, giving shape to a crisis that rocked the nation then and continues to haunt it now.

The legacies of the Civil War and Reconstruction remain a central part of American life a century and a half later. Drawing together leading scholars in literary studies and history, this volume offers accessible treatments of major authors and genres of this period, including Walt Whitman, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Rebecca Harding Davis, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Chesnutt, as well as fiction, poetry, drama, and life-writing. Although focused on literature, this Companion also canvases battlefields, homefronts, and hospitals, and discusses a range of topics, including constitutional reform and presidential impeachment; emancipation and Africa; material culture and monuments; education, civil rights, and reenactment. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction speaks powerfully to literature's ability to help readers come to terms with a violent, oppressive history while also imagining a different future.

The legacies of the Civil War and Reconstruction remain a central part of American life a century and a half later. Drawing together leading scholars in literary studies and history, this volume offers accessible treatments of major authors and genres of this period, including Walt Whitman, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Rebecca Harding Davis, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Chesnutt, as well as fiction, poetry, drama, and life-writing. Although focused on literature, this Companion also canvases battlefields, homefronts, and hospitals, and discusses a range of topics, including constitutional reform and presidential impeachment; emancipation and Africa; material culture and monuments; education, civil rights, and reenactment. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction speaks powerfully to literature's ability to help readers come to terms with a violent, oppressive history while also imagining a different future.

In the wake of the Civil War, Constance Fenimore Woolson became one of the first northern observers to linger in the defeated states from Virginia to Florida. Born in New Hampshire in 1840 and raised in Ohio, she was the grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper and was gaining success as a writer when she departed in 1873 for St. Augustine. During the next six years, she made her way across the South and reported what she saw, first in illustrated travel accounts and then in the poetry, stories, and serialized novels that brought unsettled social relations to the pages of Harper's Monthly, the Atlantic, Scribner's Monthly, Appletons' Journal, and the Galaxy. In the midst of Reconstruction and in print for years to come, Woolson revealed the sharp edges of loss, the sharper summons of opportunity, and the entanglements of northern misperceptions a decade before the waves of well-heeled tourists arrived during the 1880s.This volume's sixteen essays are intent on illuminating, through her example, the neglected world of Reconstruction's backwaters in literary developments that were politically charged and genuinely unpredictable. Drawing upon the postcolonial and transnational perspectives of New Southern Studies, as well as the cultural history, intellectual genealogy, and feminist priorities that lend urgency to the portraits of the global South, this collection investigates the mysterious, ravaged territory of a defeated nation as curious northern readers first saw it.