6. Creative words

Many prominent southern writers, including William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and Walker Percy, among others, have attested to the importance of Fedor to their work. (1) Many of these writers suggested that they identified with not just as American writers but specifically as southern writers and that their southern heritage had a lot to do both with their attraction to and interpretation of novels. It is surprising then that there are virtually no scholarly evaluations of impact on southern writers as a group. (2) Certainly, isolated and cursory remarks on the issue of reception by southerners may be found in the studies of individual southern writers, but even Jean Weisgerber, the author of the only book-length study discussing influence on a southern writer (Faulkner et Dostoevsky; et influences [1968]), in which he attempts to provide some context for Faulkner's reading of Dostoevsky, avoids the subject entirely. Several interesting observations on importance to southern writers are made in A. N. Nikoliukin's pre-Perestroika Soviet study, Vzaimosviazi literatur Rossii i SShA; Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoevskii i Amerika [Interrelations of and (American Literatures: Turgenev, Tolstoy, and America] (1987)--a significant work, despite the tendentiousness dictated by the time and place of its publication. Note must also be taken of Bertram Wyatt-Brown's provocative article, Russian Literature and the Southern Literary Modernists (1998), in which Wyatt-Brown, a prominent scholar of southern culture and literature, considers the affinities between the classical nineteenth-century novelists, including Dostoevsky, and modern southern writers. (3) To date, however, the only scholarly article that focuses specifically and exclusively on impact on a group of southern writers is Temira Pachmuss's essay, Dostoevsky and America's Southern Women Writers: Parallels and Confluences (1981), in which Pachmuss examines the works of Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and of Eudora Welty--the latter, in a much sketchier fashion--for signs of possible influence. Pachmuss's essay, written for a Festschrift more than twenty years ago, is frequently cited in discussions of influence on individual southern writers, not only because it represents one of the very few attempts to account for the ways in which the southern identity of a group of writers mediated these writers' reception of Dostoevsky, but because Pachmuss has an in-depth knowledge of writings and philosophy (she published extensively on his work), which makes her analysis particularly noteworthy. Pachmuss begins by claiming that despite originating from two completely different cultural backgrounds, the works of on the one hand, and of some of America's southern writers on the other, demonstrate a remarkable concurrence in themes, ideas, and techniques (115). She then proceeds to analyze the treatment of loneliness, love, spiritual searching, physical deformity, and violence in the writings of O'Connor, McCullers, Welty, and Dostoevsky. Throughout her essay, Pachmuss maintains that it is Christian credo that impresses southern writers most, namely, Dostoevsky's message that the existential, grotesque world of today ... may be saved from its spiritual perdition by the revelation of the fundamental principle of an all-forgiving and all-embracing (126). She posits earlier, by the way, that Dostoevsky ... argues that genuine love ... lies in Christ and radiates from Him (116). She concludes by saying that was a formative influence on twentieth-century Southern literature (126). The claims that Pachmuss puts forth in her article are generally well-argued, despite the fact that she never explains why southern writers would have to turn to a novelist for the message Jesus Saves--a notion that they were surely familiar with, if only through roadside signs and bumper stickers. …

Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of a National Literature

The American Civil War was a major theme for Robert Penn Warren from his first poetry in the middle 1920s to a biographical essay about Jefferson Davis in 1981. Between these texts, Warren published a biography of John Brown, two Civil War-focused novels, a book length “tale for verse and voices” about slavery, a book about the legacy of the war, and a dozen poems on Civil War subjects. The meaning of the Civil War is also a major issue in works that do not center on the war as well, such as All the King's Men, where an inset short story set in the Civil War era sets the moral tone of the novel. The Civil War is even an important concern of Warren's literary criticism, particularly of his work with the poetry of Melville and Whittier and the fiction of Dreiser, his discussion of other southern writers, and his work as an anthologist. During the Civil Rights era, Warren emerged as a major southern liberal voice, arguing that the South could accept racial integration without fatally surrendering its culture. Warren's texts on Civil War themes record his changing views about race and his embrace of racial integration, but they also record his constant disappointment and disenchantment with the world that emerged from the Civil War and modernity more generally. At his best, Warren articulates a tragic, nonideological vision of the war, seeing it as the result of a conflict between the ideal of justice and the concrete institutions that are supposed to be shaped by that ideal.

Reviewed by: Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War by Carole Emberton, and: A Massacre in Memphis: The Race Riot That Shook the Nation One Year after the Civil War by Stephen V. Ash Paul E. Teed Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War. Carole Emberton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-226-02427-1, pp. 296, cloth, $45.00; A Massacre in Memphis: The Race Riot That Shook the Nation One Year after the Civil War. Stephen V. Ash. New York: Hill & Wang, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8090-6797-8, pp. 304, cloth, $27.00. The two books considered here offer fresh insights into the role of violence in shaping the culture and politics of the Reconstruction South. The first, Carole Emberton’s Beyond Redemption, provides an extended analysis of the ways in which post–Civil War Americans struggled to apply the language of redemption in their attempts to explain the unprecedented violence of the war and its aftermath. The second, Stephen Ash’s A Massacre in Memphis, [End Page 75] focuses on the horrific violence of the 1866 Memphis race riot both as a key moment in the political history of Reconstruction and as a case study in the long history of American racial violence. While the violent white supremacists who toppled Reconstruction governments in the South called their movement “Redemption,” Carole Emberton’s book demonstrates that the concept of redemption generated a multivalent discourse central to the entire postwar generation’s attempt to make meaning from the unparalleled violence of the Civil War. She contends that, on the one hand, redemption could be the language of peaceful postwar change, as former slaves, abolitionists, and Radical Republicans argued for expanded and federally protected citizenship rights in order to redeem the sacrifice of soldiers and the sufferings of African Americans who had endured violence and oppression at the hands of cruel masters. On the other, redemption could also require continuing violence, especially as white southerners who rejected the moral and political legitimacy of congressional Reconstruction policy aggressively challenged the Reconstruction order. In that context, black and white men increasingly equated citizenship with martial manhood, a highly gendered concept that required violent demonstration as contending groups made their claims upon or against the national state. During this period, Emberton argues, the discourse of redemption from violence existed side by side with a strong and highly gendered tradition of masculine redemption through violence. Beyond Redemption’s focus on the ambivalent character of Civil War–era violence-redemption narratives is particularly effective in its analysis of the discourse of black enlistment. Although the leading black abolitionist Frederick Douglass celebrated the presence of black soldiers on Civil War battlefields as a transformative event in which collective black manhood and citizenship could be achieved by the redeeming experience of military service, Emberton argues that white society viewed black troops differently. Because white leaders feared that blacks might be uncontrollable on the battlefield, for example, they regularly subjected black soldiers to humiliating forms of coercion and strictly scrutinized their conduct for signs that they might seek revenge for slavery. White officers such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson took pains to reassure superiors about the bravery of their solders, but they were equally concerned about their troops’ levels of obedience and sometimes worried that they would act savagely toward southern civilians. Far from having the liberating experience Douglass hoped for, moreover, black soldiers [End Page 76] were often forced into the army by brutal “press gangs,” denied legitimate bounty payments, and poorly trained. Government officials also refused to equate military service with citizenship, sometimes describing the service of black troops as an obligation they owed their government rather than as an indication of their new status as members of the political community. While Emberton is careful not to isolate the Reconstruction discourse of redemption from the antebellum period, she is sometimes overly general in her descriptions of earlier antislavery discourse. For example, she argues that abolitionist images of black suffering focused exclusively on the damage slavery did to white society and that “nothing was said of the trauma, grief, and dislocations that white violence...

Reviewed by: Uncommonly Savage: Civil War and Remembrance in Spain and the United States by Paul D. Escott Wayne H. Bowen Uncommonly Savage: Civil War and Remembrance in Spain and the United States. Paul D. Escott. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014. ISBN 978-0-8130-4941-0, 256 pp., hardback, $74.95. The task Paul Escott has undertaken at first seems problematic: to craft a comparative history of civil war memory in two nations, with conflicts that did not share century, political ideology, continent, or language. The American Civil War, 1861–65, and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–39, however, prove sufficiently malleable to the author’s approach to make this book an engaging success on the theme of war and memory. After a brief introduction and a background chapter, the book is divided into four thematic chapters, examining the major subjects of “Ideology and Memory,” “The Past and Political Evolution,” “Reconciliation,” and “Economic Change and the Transformation of Cultural Landscapes.” Escott skillfully draws parallels between the conservative forces in both countries—southern pro-slavery elites, and Catholic, military, and other right-wing leaders in Spain—that resisted what they saw as dangerous innovations from central governments. In the case of the United States, southerners feared economic modernization, leading to northern financial dominance, but even [End Page 469] more the movement for abolitionism. In Spain, the –isms—secularism, socialism, communism, anarchism, and anti-clericalism—provoked the uprising that would become the Spanish Civil War in 1936. While there are some analogies between right-wing Spain and what would become the Confederacy, the respective aftermaths of these two civil wars were starkly different. In Spain, a civil war won by the Nationalists became the regime of Gen. Francisco Franco, in which former Republicans faced decades of persecution, restrictions on their opportunities, or even imprisonment. In the American South, after a brief period of Union occupation and Reconstruction, the same white men who had led the rebellion against the North resumed their political influence. Just over a decade after the final Union victories, segregation, intimidation, and economic repression had recreated the race-based social order of the pre–Civil War period. There were more similarities in the nurturing of respective memories after both conflicts, with the losers in each creating a more coherent and enduring vision of civil war. Spanish Republicans in exile spent decades crafting explanations for their defeat, influencing historians in other nations to take up the Republican cause. Even as the late Franco era of the 1960s and 1970s deemphasized the glorious Nationalist movement that had won the Civil War, on the Left the memory of these events remained vibrant, even if during the transition to democracy in the decade after Franco there was a conscious effort to put aside the war in the interest of civic peace. While less consistently, southern historians and popular writers created nostalgic accounts of the lost antebellum era, before the destruction wrought by vengeful industrial armies of the Yankees. Indeed, instead of a collective vision of these two conflicts, the regional and ideological divisions that had seen the actual civil wars were perpetuated by the generations that followed. Only in recent decades has anything close to a national consensus emerged in both Spain and the United States to explain these wars. Rather than the victory of a vision by winning or losing sides, in both countries a more balanced account is now replacing the rivalry of partisan memories. Complexity now seems more widespread than one-sided assigning of blame. While there continue to be political arguments over physical monuments—Confederate statues in the American South and Spanish streets named for Francoist leaders—these are no longer violent, nor of more than symbolic impact. Each civil war, especially those of the remarkable violence seen in both the American and Spanish conflicts, features its own peculiarities amid what are, after all, national circumstances and origins. At times, the author draws parallels that are too close, obscuring their historical uniqueness. For example, the gulf between Spanish landowners of the twentieth century and southern plantation owners of the nineteenth was quite significant, but both groups are described similarly, as rural elites. However, Escott has shown that...

Emancipation, sickness, and death in the American Civil War

Dans cet article, l'auteur se propose d'analyser les similitudes dans l'education des Afro-americains et sud-africains noirs durant les periodes de segregation et d'Apartheid. La nature de l'oppression en milieu scolaire permet de lier les approches des Etats-Unis et de l'Afrique du Sud en matiere d'education pour les populations visees ainsi que l'usage par les communautes noires, dans ces deux contextes, de l'education comme ascenseur social, permettant de depasser les limites imposees par la segregation. Il est a noter egalement les strategies identiques, dans ces deux environnements, mises en place par les parents, les chefs d'etablissements et les enseignants pour encourager les eleves a depasser le contexte de l'oppression...

The Segregated Schooling of Blacks in the Southern United States and South Africa

Reviewed by: Rethinking the Irish in the American South: Beyond Rounders and Reelers ed. by Bryan Albin Giemza Peter D. O’Neill (bio) Rethinking the Irish in the American South: Beyond Rounders and Reelers. Edited by Bryan Albin Giemza. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. Pp. 223. $60.00 cloth) Studies of Irish migration to the United States recently have placed renewed focus on the experiences of the Irish in the American South. In Rethinking the Irish in the American South: Beyond Rounders and Reelers, an interdisciplinary collection of essays, editor Bryan Albin Giemza has produced a worthy addition to this literature. Contributors to the volume include two persons particularly responsible for the resurgent interest in this area, Kieran Quinlan and David Gleeson. Quinlan’s “After Strange Kin: Further Reflections on the Relations between Ireland and the American South,” is found in “Questions of Historical Definition,” the first of three sections in the collection. As its title suggests, the essay reflects upon the impact of Strange Kin: Ireland and the American South (2007), Quinlan’s influential challenge both to facile, religion-based categorizations of Irish migrants to the South and to frequently ill-informed comparisons between the geographic entities of Ireland and the South. Completing the opening section of this volume are William Ferris’s “‘A Lengthening Chain in the Shape of Memories’: The Irish and Southern Culture” and Patrick Griffin’s “Irish Migration to the Colonial South: A Plea for a Forgotten Topic,” both of which offer a nuanced view of Irish migration to the southern states. The second section, “Manipulating Culture: Influence, Reconsidered,” will resonate with persons interested in literary and cultural studies. Geraldine Higgins’s superb “Tara, the O’Haras, and the Irish Gone With the Wind,” investigates the element of Irishness in the racialist chemistry of Margaret Mitchell’s famous text. Next is Kathryn Stelmach Artuso’s “Transatlantic Rites of Passage in the Friendship and Fiction of Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen,” an insightful, if [End Page 518] at times repetitive, exposé of the relationship between two celebrated writers: Welty, a Mississippian, and Bowen, a Dublin-born Anglo-Irishwoman. Rounding off the section are two illuminating essays, “Shared Traditions: Irish and Appalachian Ballads and Whiskey Songs” by Emily Kader and “Black and Celts on the Riverine Frontiers: The Roots of American Popular Music” by Christopher Smith. It is to the final section on “Ideology and Ambivalence” that Gleeson contributes his chapter, “Another ‘Lost Cause’: The Irish in the South Remember the Confederacy.” In this essay, Gleeson, author of the seminal work The Irish in the South, 1815–1877 (2001), describes how the Irish in the South engaged in Lost Cause rituals, so that they “and their offspring overcame a mixed war record and suspicions of their foreignness, becoming part of what it meant to be southern in the New South” (p. 179). He sets the stage nicely for Giemza’s “On the Uses of Slavery: The Irish in the South and Civil War Rhetoric.” This absorbing and groundbreaking essay uncovers the previously obscured Irish roots of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, author of the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 Dred Scott ruling. The essay examines the significance of Taney’s Roman Catholicism with regard to the slavery issue, and presents a fascinating account of observations by Irish who visited the United States during the Civil War. Giemza observes that “invented rhetorical parallels between Ireland and the American South . . . deployed by the likes of Irish revolutionary John Mitchel . . . had real traction among the Southern Irish ascendant” (p. 189). Ironically, Conor O’Callaghan, whose “Smoke ‘n’ Guns: A Preface to a Poem about Marginal Souths, and Then the Poem” concludes the collection, indulges in similarly misguided invention. In equating the Irish Republican Army with the Ku Klux Klan, O’Callaghan displays a historical revisionism just as blinkered as that in which Mitchel engaged more than 150 years earlier. This chapter seems an incongruous choice for the collection’s “Coda.” Yet it does not despoil what precedes it; to the contrary, O’Callaghan’s conflation underlines the need for the clarity and the precision amply provided by the rest of the contributors to this fine collection. [End...

Reviewed by: Rethinking the Irish in the American South: Beyond Rounders and Reelers ed. by Bryan Albin Giemza Mathieu W. Billings Rethinking the Irish in the American South: Beyond Rounders and Reelers, edited by Bryan Albin Giemza, pp. 223. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. $60. Over the past twenty-five years, the history of the Irish in the American South has emerged as a dynamic field of study. From academic claims that Southern culture was essentially “Celtic,” to more popular conceptions of mythical Irish Southerners—such as Gone with the Wind’s Gerald O’Hara—the implications are clear: Irish Americans would have felt more at home in the South than [End Page 157] anywhere else in the United States. Yet thorny questions over “Irishness” have blurred some of these assumptions. As one contributor to Rethinking the Irish in the American South notes, “how much can a staunchly Protestant society . . . have in common with the country that until recently was seen as perhaps the most Roman Catholic in the world?” This interdisciplinary and well-edited collection not only challenges the notion that the Irish were somehow “natural” southerners; it proposes a framework for future exploits in the field. Rather than searching for Irish “influences” in the American South, editor Bryan Giemza challenges scholars to “distinguish between analogous experience, shared history, and common cause, and to consider how and why these things are so often muddled together.” With these distinctions in mind, readers should begin this collection at the end, with Conor O’Callaghan’s “Smoke ’N’ Guns”—a literary experience akin to having dessert first. The author’s often-humorous prose and sobering poetry serve as reminders that even today, residents of the South of Ireland and the American South indeed share analogous experiences. Here, this native of the Irish borderlands who later settled in North Carolina makes connections that are compelling, yet hardly romantic. From the tobacco-based, smoke-ridden economies of Dundalk and Winston-Salem, to the violence and intimidation of the IRA and the KKK, O’Callaghan sees two societies, “where the border really does cross backyards and the Civil War keeps on happening in the hapless imaginations of certain aging men.” In “Smoke ’N’ Guns,” O’Callaghan’s analogous experiences in both “Souths” reveal possibilities and expose limitations of projecting a shared history and common cause upon these two similar, yet often very different, societies. Following “Smoke ’N’ Guns,” many of the remaining chapters offer a range of historical, musical, and literary analyses, which explore Giemza’s second analytical category: shared histories. As Patrick Griffin observes in his essay on “Irish Migration to the Colonial South,” the paths of Irish emigrants and the American South first overlapped during the seventeenth century. Yet due to a longstanding teleological lexicon employed by scholars, such terms as “Irish,” “Scotch-Irish,” and even “South” have obscured this shared history. To contemporaries, “Irish” meant any emigrant from Ireland, and the colonial “South” might well have included such places as Barbados, Monserrat, and Bermuda. Emily Kader’s “Shared Traditions,” a study of the roots of Appalachian ballads and whiskey songs, issues a similar warning about anachronistic nationalist categories. By cross-examining secondary sources and contemporary lyrics, she argues that “Irish influences cannot be discarded,” but folk music from Ireland was itself “a hybrid of various international folkloristic strains.” And in a chapter on shared literary histories in the twentieth century, Kathryn Stelmach Artuso explores the “transatlantic friendship” of Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen. Here, the author pushes the [End Page 158] boundaries of the Irish and Southern literary renaissances “beyond the Yeats-Synge partnership” to the strong female characters of Welty and Bowen, who not only upset typecasts but underscored the theme of individual rebirth evident in both literary movements. Overall, such exemplary works indicate that there are vast opportunities for scholars to explore the shared histories between the Irish and the American South. As to Giemza’s distinction of common cause, more than half of the chapters in this collection address the issues of race and whiteness. Noel Ignatiev’s argument that America’s Irish “became white” when they ceased to “be green” is nearly twenty years old, but it...

Reviewed by: Philadelphia Stories: America's Literature of Race and Freedom Mary Ryan (bio) Philadelphia Stories: America's Literature of Race and Freedom. By Samuel Otter. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. 369. Cloth, $29.95.) Philadelphia Stories is a showcase of textual analysis, firmly set in time and place and commanding the attention of historians of the Civil War. It is an invitation to interdisciplinary conversation that should not be declined, given how it deepens our understanding of race in American history as well as literature. Samuel Otter conducts literary analysis with stunning finesse and at the same time acknowledges "the need to understand the historical situation of … literary achievement" (4). Neither historicism nor formalism, Otter avers, should dominate the study of racial thought in antebellum America. Furthermore, Philadelphia Stories sets a path for collaboration between our disciplines upon methodological grounds we share, the conceptual frame of place and space as exemplified by the antebellum American city. The consummate effect of Philadelphia Stories is to expose the prodigious, wrenching, multivoiced, and high-stakes debate about race that went on north of slavery and before the Civil War. Otter exposes the most patently racist literary fare in the City of Brotherly Love and reports the bold rebuttals issued by the city's free black leaders, who "seize[d] the tenuous opportunities of emancipation, and fiercely negotiated, at the level of the word" (38). Otter squeezes multiple complex meanings out of graphic images as well. He scrutinizes Edward Clay's racist cartoons (which routinely illustrate history books) and places them in a wider satirical tradition that targeted nearly every category of person who walked Philadelphia streets. Otter goes on to pair these images with less well known visual portraits, Charles Willson Peale's popular silhouettes, which minimize racial difference. Otter's explications of documents like these illuminate issues that have long consumed Civil War historians. His investigations of African American domesticity, moral reform, and consumerism amplify the work of Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., and Patrick Rael (but Otter disputes the latter's gentle indictment of African writers for masculinist and bourgeois prejudice). Philadelphia Stories also lends support to the cultural historian's recognition of the pliability and ambiguity of identity in antebellum America. Picaresque writing like that of Hugh [End Page 265] Henry Brackenridge reveled in shifting and reversing identities, not just from black to white but from animal to human, and sometimes introduced these ambiguities into debates about civil rights and the franchise. These challenges to racial certitude were mounted in a specific time and place, in a northern city and especially during the 1840s, when both social geography and the setting of the novel were just beginning to sort class, race, and ethnicity into different districts and along different streets. Otter's exemplary method of interrogating documents is literary history in the best sense. Most of his stories lead to other texts, defer to other critics, and culminate in aesthetic judgments. Otter closes his text with a brilliant exegesis of Melville's novella of aborted slave mutiny, Benito Cereno. He presses his interpretation to the maximum point of African American rebellion, dwelling on the scene in which the mutinous slave pierces the throat of the white ship captain: "just then the razor drew blood, spots of which stained the creamy lather under the throat" (272). Otter refrains, however, from asserting a single reading of this or other texts. He seems to endorse Melville's preferred posture of critical distance: "Melville works hard not to ensure a 'correct' reading" (270). Otter also calls in the aesthetic heavy weapon, Henry James, to assert that "history is never, in any rich sense, the immediate crudity of what 'happens' but the much finer complexity of what we read into it and think of in connection with it" (165). At this juncture, this historian is moved to acknowledge compatible and useful differences between our disciplines. Otter's literary argument progresses by way of textual association, moving from one document to another based on the repetition of words and images. Less constrained by considerations of proximity in time or actual relationships, he can move agilely from antebellum Philadelphia to Dutch still...

Tennessee Williams is regarded as one of the most significant figures throughout the history of American literature. Tennessee Williams is always seen as one of the most famous representative writers of American south along with Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor. A Streetcar Named Desire, first published in 1947, has run for almost 855 performances. It’s one of Williams’ most famous plays and it has always been studied in all aspects by numerous scholars for many years. Since Tennessee Williams lived in American south and his grandfather was an Anglican so there is no doubt that his works are influenced by the religion in American south and his own family. However, the researches on A Streetcar Named Desire from the perspective of mythological archetype are much fewer. Thus, this thesis is an attempt to employ Frye’s archetypal theory to analyze the mythological archetypal symbols of the environment, theme and characters in one of Tennessee Williams’ noted plays, A Streetcar Named Desire.This thesis will be divided into four parts, including an introduction, the theoretical framework, an analyzing part and a conclusion. The first part of the thesis will contain the relative background information of Tennessee Williams and his play A Streetcar Named Desire and a comprehensive literature review of researches on A Streetcar Named Desire on the main perspectives. In the second part, the author introduces the development and the main ideas of Frazer, Jung and Frye’s theories.The third part probes into the mythological archetype of the setting, characters and the theme. The author uses Fyre’s Myth-archetype theory to analyze the archetype of the setting of the play, the mythological archetypal characters and the theme in A Streetcar Named Desire. In the conclusion part, a general summary is given and the significance of analyzing the mythological archetypes in A Streetcar Named Desire is reaffirmed further. The author also analyzes the limitations and shortcomings of this thesis. What’s more, the use of mythological archetype in the play to some extent shows the playwright’s pity and sympathy for the decay of American south just as the loss of Eden as a southern writer, indicating his sense of nostalgia of the south.

Historians of the American Civil War have debated a wide range of questions raised by the war and its outcome. None have been more vigorously argued as those surrounding its outcome. One of the leading explanations for Confederate defeat has been the argument that the Civil War South lacked a national identity. Related to and supporting this argument is the contention that the Civil War South failed to produce a distinct and vibrant literary culture. These contentions have been challenged by a growing body of literature which argues that the Civil War South did produce a sense of cultural and national identity. This book adds to this counter current through an examination of the Civil War experiences and writings of the Antebellum South's leading literary figure. Surprisingly, given William Gilmore Simms' well-known status prior to the war, his life and work during the course of the war itself has been understudied. This examination reveals the depth and extent to which Simms not only supported the Confederate war effort but how Simms conceptualized and articulated a vision of Confederate nationalism.

In Carson McCullers' 1936 collection of short stories, The Ballad of Sad Cafe and Other Stories, issues of ethnic difference, racialization, and negotiation of identifies play a central role. This is not surprising, considering that loosely imagined body of texts known as the Southern Renaissance has a strong preoccupation with these themes. Southern writers, both Anglo- and African American, have long fore-grounded question in representing and imagining New South following Civil War, and McCullers is no exception. Her characters grapple with what it means to be in South, what it means not to be white, and what it means to challenge or comply with standards of whiteness. However, what differentiates The Ballad of Sad Cafe and Other Stories from most other pieces of southern literature is relative absence of African American characters. If, as many theorists of race in United States have pointed out, notions of and notions of white are mutually constitutive and exist in a hierarchical binary, can whiteness ever be reconceptualized in a way that does not define it against and above blackness? In other words, can white exist apart from black? I argue that McCullers attempts to answer yes to such questions by introducing European immigrant characters into southern fiction. This gesture interrogates southern identity through means other than comparisons to black southern identity. It is important to note that absence of African American characters in this collection of stories is not an oversight that resulted from presenting some new form of ethnic difference. Rather, this absence is functional. It serves to isolate and explore in some depth a new valance of race emerging in New South without having to revert to well-trodden path of imagining racialization within black-white binary. McCullers' conceptual replacement of African American with European immigrant in her examination of racial and ethnic difference has its counterpart in southern labor history. During late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, many southern states launched campaigns to attract European immigrants in response to labor shortages caused by black migration to West and Southwest immediately after Civil War and to North during Great Migration. For a South struggling to rebuild itself both economically and ideologically, European immigrant labor seemed a viable and even more favorable replacement for black labor. An avid recruiter of European immigrant labor in years immediately following Civil War, Richard Hathaway Edmonds founded a white-supremacist newsletter called Manufacturers' Record to provide coverage on southern industry and capitalism. Edmonds launched aggressive campaign to recruit laborers from Europe as a way to compensate for declining black laborer population in South. However, he intended for only immigrants of Anglo- and northern European stock to fulfill his goals. By 1880s, wave of immigrants from these areas gave way to those from eastern and southern Europe. This new influx of immigrants, Edmonds believed, did not assimilate properly and threatened Anglo-European racial integrity of South. By 1920s, Manufacturers' Record reversed its stance toward immigration, embracing nativist sentiments along with rest of United States and becoming one of most vocal anti-immigrant publications. Even if South's desire for immigrant labor had not been conflicted from start, region's attractiveness to European newcomers paled in comparison to that of North. Southern historian Martha G. Synott argues that South's attempt to lure and retain immigrants was doomed from beginning because it lacked high wages and inexpensive land that could be found in North. And from point of view of employers, southern landowners were more willing to exploit black labor because of their impression that Jim Crow laws regulated autonomy of blacks, making them more docile and reliable than immigrants. …

Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War Carole Emberton. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013.In the penultimate scene of 2012's Lincoln, the titular president is assassinated. After brief talk of his funeral, a spectral Lincoln emerges in a flickering candle, delivering his Gettysburg Address. In its reversed construction, this scene superbly summarizes the rote lesson we are taught about the Civil War: its one-half million deaths are a testament to the procurement of freedom. However, this moment is deceptive. It portends a simplistic, legalistic end to a brutal struggle. Moreover, this cinematic interpretation emphasizes the importance of Carole Emberton's new study of the post-Civil War South, Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War.Beginning with the end of the Civil War, Emberton examines the language of redemption, a term that was used both to atone for the sins of slavery as well as to resist the empowerment of ex-slaves. Emberton's look at this dichotomy sheds light on the true difficulty in freeing the slaves: it was much easier to declare the slaves freedmen that it was to recalibrate society to accept a federally imposed manumission. This acceptance was made doubly difficult by the media's sensational reporting of crime and mayhem (26) that threatened a degree of discombobulation to rival the war itself (27). Such apparent chaos was blamed on a number of causes: the recent end of the war, women's entry into the political realm, causing them to neglect their duties to the family (28), and most notably the introduction of freedmen into society. While images of antebellum slaves suffering gave rise to the cause of abolitionists, the freedman's unkempt appearance, scarred skins, and educational deficiencies conjured a scary, self-referential familiarity that disturbed the social order thrust into a legal equality. In turn, white reformers embarked upon a civilizing mission that stressed the importance of discipline, and at times, even suffering as a necessary condition of (38). So it is within freedom that former slaves find another form of bondage and the civilized find another way to control.Amongst these conditions of freedom, Beyond Redemption also explores the presumed requisites for freedom: earning wages and owning land. The first is an obvious deviation from the servitude of slavery. The latter represented a sense of place, of belonging, of home (77). …