Malcolm Scott - Böcker

This study of films relating to the American Civil War extends beyond the four-year military phase of the war, looking forward to the cinema of the twentieth-century Civil Rights period and backward to films about the pre-war years in which the origins and causes of the conflict are also reflected. This is the «long» Civil War of the book’s title, underpinning its originality as a discussion of Hollywood’s concern with the unresolved racial tensions that led to the war and which persist in different but related forms long after its ending. All the major films about the Civil War and a large number of lesser known films are discussed here. There are separate chapters on the two most famous and controversial films of the genre, the 1915 work The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, and on the Civil War Western that helps to perpetuate the memory of the United States’ most costly and nation-forming armed struggle. The film industry’s reluctance during the silent era to portray the realities of slavery and its exclusion of African American actors from major screen roles are also important themes, and cinema’s eventual self-emancipation in the wake of liberating Civil Rights films is presented as a final Hollywood success story.

This reassessment of Chateaubriand’s literary and political achievements, offered as an intellectual biography of the writer, is centred on the concept of change and Chateaubriand’s emotional suspicion of change, arising both from mistrust of his own inconstancy and from the personal and collective suffering of the French Revolution. His aversion to change spread beyond politics to religion and literature, but conflicted with his intellectual fascination with historic change in all three areas. The paradox of his fluctuating attitude to change allows a challenge to traditional views of Chateaubriand’s status. Was he truly a committed founder of French Romanticism? Was he an unswerving right-wing legitimist? Was he an insincere and ‘aesthetic’ Christian? The book provides new answers to these questions, presenting a very different Chateaubriand both through an analysis of his preference for the epic literature of Greece and Rome and its Christian heritage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and by its account of his subtle pleading for constitutional monarchy. Malcolm Scott argues that the failure of Chateaubriand’s political aspirations led him, again paradoxically, to the espousal of change and to a final dramatic reversal of his literary and religious standpoint, expressed in the writings of the last few years of his life.