Mary Chesnut's Civil War Epic

by Stern, Julia A.

• ISBN13: 9780226773285
• ISBN10: 0226773280
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-01-15
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

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 itwhich 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. InMary 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.

Author Biography

Julia A. Stern is associate professor of English and American Studies and the Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University. She is the author of The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Walls Epic In Miniature	p. 29
Seeds Fertility, Flowers And Fratricide	p. 49
Seeds Fruits And Famine	p. 79
Words Reading And Writing	p. 107
Smells The Stench Of Slavery And Sentiment	p. 133
Masks Theatricals In Black	p. 167
Masks Theatricals In White	p. 191
Revolt Family Troubles In The House Divided	p. 207
Revolt More Family Troubles In The House Divided	p. 231
Recognition Looking Defeat In The Face	p. 253
Notes	p. 267
Index	p. 311
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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