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.
Part I. The Blind Ruck of Event: 1. Violent identifications: Civilian sectional rhetoric's during the American civil war Kimberly L. Harrison; 2. Reading, sociability, and warfare Sarah E. Gardner; 3. Reconstructing the civil war literature of injury, illness, and convalescence: caregivers, soldiers, and civilians Jane E. Schultz; 4. “The home and the camp so inseparable”: Northern fictions and the union cause Allison M. Johnson; 5. The confederacy and other southern fictions Katharine A. Burnett; 6. The civil war ballad and its reconstruction Timothy Sweet; 7. The unfinished drama of the American civil war Matthew Rebhorn; 8. Walt Whitman and the reconstructive impulse of leaves of grass Samuel Graber; 9. Reconsidering Moses: Frances Ellen Watkins harper and reconstruction Eric Gardner; 10. From “Facts” to “Pictures”: Rebecca Harding Davis and civil war memory Alicia Mischa Renfroe; Part II. Worlds Made and Remade: 11. The literature of reconstruction and the worlds the civil war might have made Brook Thomas; 12. Frederick Douglass, Andrew Johnson, and the work of reconstruction Robert S. Levine; 13. African Americans, Africa, and the long watch night for freedom Barbara McCaskill; 14. Literature and the material cultures of confederate remembrance Kristen Treen; 15. Elmira and the postwar geographies of black monumentalizing Jill Spivey Caddell; 16. Charles Chesnutt and the reconstruction of black education Tess Chakkalakal; 17. Charles Chesnutt, the colonel's dream, and the futures of cotton Jennifer James; 18.Brown v. Board, the civil war centennial, and the literature of civil rights Michael LeMahieu; 19. The future of civil war and reconstruction literature Cody Marrs; 20. Reenactment as resistance Patricia Davis.
Kathleen Diffley is an associate professor of English at the University of Iowa and director of the Civil War Caucus. She is the author of Where My Heart Is Turning Ever: Civil War Stories and Constitutional Reform, 1861–1876 (1992; 2020) and The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861–1876 (2021). Coleman Hutchison is an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Apples and Ashes: Literature, Nationalism, and the Confederate States of America (2012), the co-author of Writing About American Literature: A Guide for Students (2014), and the editor of A History of American Civil War Literature (2015).
