Memory and Myth

by Sachsman, David

• ISBN13: 9781557534392
• ISBN10: 155753439X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-05-01
• Publisher: Purdue Univ Pr

Summary

Memory and Myth is an interdisciplinary study of the Civil War and its enduring impact on American writers and filmmakers. Its twenty-five chapters are all concerned, in one way or another, with creative responses to the Civil War, and the ways in which artists have sought to make sense of the war and to convey their findings to succeeding generations of readers and filmgoers. The book also examines the role of movies and television in transmuting the historical memories of the Civil War into durable, ever-changing myths.

Author Biography

David B. Sachsman holds the George R. West, Jr. Chair of Excellence in Communication and Public Affairs at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. He is known for his research and scholarly activities in environmental communication and environmental risk reporting. S. Kittrell Rushing is the Frank McDonald Professor of Communication and the head of the Communication Department at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. His current research interests include newspapers of the antebellum and Civil War eras. Roy Morris Jr. is the editor of Military Heritage magazine and the author of four well-received books on the Civil War and post-Civil War eras.

Table of Contents

"This inherited misfortune" : gender, race, and slavery in Uncle Tom's cabin and Gone with the wind	p. 11
Beyond Uncle Tom's Cabin	p. 23
The terror of Poe : slavery, the southern gentleman, and the status quo	p. 39
John Brown : the many faces of a nineteenth-century martyr	p. 49
The fugitive imagination : Robert Penn Warren's John Brown	p. 59
The search for community and justice : Robert Penn Warren, race relations, and the Civil War	p. 71
Between fiction and fact : Ben Wood, Fort Lafayette, and Civil War America	p. 83
William Gilmore Simms : a literary casualty of the Civil War	p. 95
Henry Adams's Civil War : despair and democracy	p. 105
"So many, many needless dead" : the Civil War witness of Ambrose Bierce	p. 115
Of saints and sinners : religion and the Civil War and Reconstruction novel	p. 127
On whose responsibility? : the historical and literary underpinnings of The red badge of courage	p. 137
A muckraker at Manassas : Upton Sinclair's Civil War fiction	p. 153
Narrative art and modernist sensibility in the Civil War fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald	p. 163
"Let the story tellers invent it all" : Col. John S. Mosby in popular literature	p. 177
Hydra or Heracles? : Nathan Bedford Forrest in Civil War fiction	p. 185
Tap roots and the free state of Jones	p. 197
"Savage Satori" : fact and fiction in Charles Frazier's Cold mountain	p. 207
"History with lightning" : the legacy of D. W. Griffith's The birth of a nation	p. 223
Hollywood themes and southern myths : an analysis of Gone with the wind	p. 235
Knights in blue and butternut : television's Civil War	p. 243
History thrice removed : Joshua Chamberlain and Gettysburg	p. 251
"Ain't nobody clean" : Glory! and the politics of black agency	p. 261
Alex Haley's Roots : the fiction of fact	p. 269
A voice of the south : the transformation of Shelby Foote	p. 281
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