Civil War literature and the prospect of America / by John William Cheairs Howell.
"This dissertation reconsiders and reframes the longstanding critical discourse on the subject of American Civil War literature, and it does so from the disciplinary vantage of Religion and Literature. Arguing that Civil War literature should be understood as a problematic rather than as a genr...
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Online Access |
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| Format: | Thesis eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2013.
©2013. |
| Summary: | "This dissertation reconsiders and reframes the longstanding critical discourse on the subject of American Civil War literature, and it does so from the disciplinary vantage of Religion and Literature. Arguing that Civil War literature should be understood as a problematic rather than as a genre with readily identifiable representational demands, the dissertation contends that the animating dynamic of the discourse on Civil War literature is an aporia: on the one hand, the discourse's early exponents (e.g. Walt Whitman, John Weiss, John William De Forest) insist that the events of the war will prove seminal for the creation of a robust American literature, which will evince America's spiritual unity. On the other hand, their critical musings betray the worry that an honest accounting of the war's traumas troubles the postwar predication of that same unity. The individual chapters characterize the dissertation's intervention relative to the discourse on Civil War literature and offer close readings of texts (novels, photographs, one volume surveys of American religious history, and the discourse on American civil religion) that negotiate the aporetic logic of Civil War literature in differential ways. Classing both narratives of complementarity (i.e. texts that occlude the war's disorders in the service of mitigating the war's disjunctive force) and contrarian narratives (i.e. texts that highlight the war's traumas and interrogate, thereby, the complementarity of the war and a providential reading of American history) as instances of Civil War literature, the dissertation argues that the historical neglect of contrarian texts (especially the literary efforts of Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James) is bound up with an insistence upon the war's apocalyptic efficacy. The project's constructive wager, framed in terms of the ethics of historical memory, is that convoking and recommending a contrarian strand of Civil War memory might function as a ground for the contemporary ethical eschewal of millennial nationalist presuppositions that gain momentum in the postwar epoch and that continue to structure American cultural and political life and rhetoric." |
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| Item Description: | Advisor: Richard A. Rosengarten. "UMI Number: 3595922"--Title page verso. |
| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (x, 433 pages) : illustrations. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references. |