Mary Chesnut's Civil War Epic
eBook - ePub

Mary Chesnut's Civil War Epic

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Mary Chesnut's Civil War Epic

About this book

A genteel southern intellectual, saloniste, and wife to a prominent colonel in Jefferson Davis's inner circle, Mary Chesnut today is remembered best for her penetrating Civil War diary. Composed between 1861 and 1865 and revised thoroughly from the late 1870s until Chesnut's death in 1886, the diary was published first in 1905, again in 1949, and later, to great acclaim, in 1981. This complicated literary history and the questions that attend it—which edition represents the real Chesnut? To what genre does this text belong?—may explain why the document largely has, until now, been overlooked in literary studies.

Julia A. Stern's critical analysis returns Chesnut to her rightful place among American writers. In Mary Chesnut's Civil War Epic, Stern argues that the revised diary offers the most trenchant literary account of race and slavery until the work of Faulkner and that, along with his Yoknapatawpha novels, it constitutes one of the two great Civil War epics of the American canon. By restoring Chesnut's 1880s revision to its complex, multidecade cultural context, Stern argues both for Chesnut's reinsertion into the pantheon of nineteenth-century American letters and for her centrality to the literary history of women's writing as it evolved from sentimental to tragic to realist forms.

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Yes, you can access Mary Chesnut's Civil War Epic by Julia A. Stern in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & American Civil War History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication Page
  5. Contents
  6. List of Figures
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. One: Introduction
  9. Two: Walls Epic in Miniature
  10. Three: Seeds Fertility, Flowers, and Fratricide
  11. Four: Seeds Fruits and Famine
  12. Five: Words Reading and Writing
  13. Six: Smells the Stench of Slavery and Sentiment
  14. Seven: Masks Theatr Icals in Black
  15. Eight: Masks Theatricals in White
  16. Nine: Revolt Family Troubles in the House Divided
  17. Ten: Revolt More Family Troubles in the House
  18. Eleven: Recognition Looking Defeat in the Face
  19. Notes
  20. Index