Southern Literary Messenger Research Articles

John Neal on Hawthorne and Poe in the New England Galaxy of 1835

Neal (1793-1876) had praised Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel Fanshawe in 1828, stating that its author had fair prospect of future success (Wineapple 84). Neal had also praised Edgar Allan Poe's book of poems Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems in 1829 and 1830 and Poe's Poems in 1831, stating that the author was fine genius (Walker 66-69, 76). Given Neal's early appreciation of both Hawthorne and Poe, his consideration of these writers not too long afterward would be of great interest. Neal's year-long editorship of the weekly newspaper the New England Galaxy in 1833 offers a glimpse of his developing opinion of the two authors and of their developing reputations. His comments, as well as those of his junior editor, H. Hastings Weld (1811-1888), were largely, though not exclusively, positive, and, to the best of my knowledge, have not been reprinted--except for those about the August 1835 Southern Literary Messenger that Poe reprinted himself. Neal was a pioneering novelist and critic from Portland, Maine, who had served as an editor for Portico (1818), Federal Republican (1819), and Yankee and Boston Literary Gazette (1828-1829) (Richards, John Neal: A Bibliography 298). He was bold, direct, and devoted to the growth of American literature. (1) At the New England Galaxy, he joined H. Hastings Weld, who would later become editor of several New York newspapers, including the Evening Tattler and Brother Jonathan, and a target of Poe's in The Mystery of Marie Roget (Kopley, Edgar Allan Poe and the Dupin Mysteries 54-63, 106-9). Weld announced his new fellow editor--the Senior Editor--in a Galaxy editorial of December 27, 1834, stating Each [editor] will be individually responsible for his own articles, as the author will be designated by his initials, or otherwise (Editorials). (Usually, the two men distinguished their work with an N or a W.) And Neal, in his introductory piece, on January 3, 1835, offers To Virtue, Genius and tried or untried Worth, wherever it may be found, and in whatever it may consist, a reasonable share of encouragement--as the world goes (To All Whom It May Concern). A brief notice of the January 1835 issue of the New England Magazine does not offer any comments on specific works by Hawthorne (New England Magazine for January). However, Neal and Weld offer implicit encouragement to the still-anonymous author by reprinting in the January 10, 1835, issue of the Galaxy, his story from that January issue, The Gray Champion, which presents General William Goffe as the spirit of New England. Weld announces in a slightly longer notice of the January issue of the New England Magazine, Upon our first page we have placed an article from the last (The New England Magazine [January 1835]). story was taken from Hawthorne's book manuscript The Story Teller, which had originally been received by Samuel G. Goodrich of Token (9:495, Newman 138, and Wineapple 81; see also Weber and George). A week later, Neal mentions the editors of the New England Magazine, Samuel G. Howe and J. O. Sargent, and provides a general comment on the contents of the January 1835 issue (which included an article of his own): The matter [is] generally good enough to get along of itself without a regular puff' (New England Magazine: Jan. '35). Throughout 1835, Neal and/or Weld offered their comments on Hawthorne in the context of reviews of issues of the New England Magazine that featured Hawthorne's work. (2) Weld praises the February issue of the New England Magazine. The second of the new volume in numerical order--the first in merit. It contains indeed a better variety of interesting matter than any preceding number for months. He writes, more specifically, The first article, 'Old News,' transports one back to the knee buckles and 'solemn wigs' of 1700, and gathers traits of the times from the newspapers of that day. He does not mention Hawthorne's name, but he seems to have followed the writings of the unnamed author: 'My Visit to Niagara,' is by the author of the 'Gentle Boy,'--and the 'Gray Champion. …

Matthew Fontaine Maury: Reformer

Although he was better known as a scientist than a reformer, Matthew Fontaine Maury’s influence as the latter was hardly negligible. Maury argued for institutional expansion and reform during a period of agitation and stagnation for the American navy. Published in Richmond’s Southern Literary Messenger between 1840 and 1841, Maury’s five ‘Scraps from the Lucky Bag’ agitated for wide-ranging reforms aimed at tackling the numerous inefficiencies and inadequacies of the navy. His proposed reforms served multiple purposes. Naval reform was, for Maury, a matter of necessity, and advocating for it permitted him to challenge the limited role that the navy occupied in 1840. It also served as a way for Maury to address the anxieties of the antebellum South’s maritime interests and make the case for real protection of Southern coastal waters. Lastly, Maury’s plan of reform was based in and allowed a re-imagination of the navy as the modern, powerful arm of an ambitious national project. This article considers Maury’s ‘Scraps from the Lucky Bag’ as both advocacy for naval reform and a specific vision of both the South and the nation. Situating Maury within American anxieties over expansion and international interference, this article argues that Maury leveraged, or attempted to leverage, those anxieties to achieve his goal of reform. Maury’s advocacy for naval reform was not only an argument for a larger, more technologically advanced and better organized force, but also for the territorial and maritime expansion of the United States. For Maury, these projects were fundamentally linked. A reconsideration of Maury’s efforts towards naval reform opens a window on the conflicting visions and anxieties of American expansion, both national and sectional, as well as the configuration of the American navy in the mid-19th century.

Poe in Richmond: The Sale of the Lost Lenore House and Other Poe Sites

Poe in Richmond: The Sale of the Lost Lenore House and Other Poe Sites

Poe in Richmond: The Sale of the Lost Lenore House and Other Poe Sites

Poe in Richmond: The Sale of the Lost Lenore House and Other Poe Sites

The Annotated Poe

The Annotated Poe

The Annotated Poe

The Annotated Poe

Satire, Minstrelsy, and Embodiment in Sheppard Lee

Satire, Minstrelsy, and Embodiment in Sheppard Lee Benjamin J. Doty (bio) Let those shine now that never shined before,And those that always shone now shine the more. —Advertisement to Hunt’s Blacking. The above epigraph to Robert Montgomery Bird’s 1836 novel Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself suggests that it will be a tale of transformation, and indeed its protagonist undergoes profound changes. After Sheppard Lee strikes his foot with a mattock while digging for buried treasure in a New Jersey forest, his spirit exits his body (47). The disembodied Lee wanders the woods until he comes across the corpse of Squire Higginson, a local brewer, and to his surprise, he finds that he can house his spirit in the dead man’s body and reanimate it (52). Upon doing so, he discovers that Higginson’s corpse carries within it an innate character that changes his natural affections and instincts. Drawing on the language of contemporary medicine, he says that the new body’s power over his thought and behavior is such that he becomes a completely different person. Over the course of the novel, he bounces from corpse to corpse—rich and poor, free and slave—reporting throughout that his original identity is overwhelmed by the makeup of others’ physiques. That the bodies Lee inhabits are dead emphasizes the degree to which he views their materiality itself as determinative: “much of the evil and good of man’s nature,” he says, “arise from causes and influences purely physical” (140). Scholars who have written about Sheppard Lee tend to understand Bird as in agreement with Lee’s materialist account of selfhood because this account dovetails with early nineteenth-century medical discourses on character and consciousness. Bird was, after all, a physician. Samuel Otter offers an insightful reading of the ways Lee’s account of embodiment calls attention to the soul’s ties to “the material it inhabits”; this account, Otter asserts, “stem[s] from [Bird’s] medical training” (100, 95). Christopher Looby, similarly, writes in his trenchant introduction to the novel that its [End Page 131] “physiognomic determinism … must owe a good deal to Bird’s experience as a medical doctor” (xvii). Recently, Jordan Alexander Stein and Justine Murison have read the novel as having a less straightforward relationship to Lee’s portrayal of embodiment. In particular, both attend to how Bird uses Lee’s materialist metaphysics of consciousness as a source of comedy. Stein notes that Lee’s philosophical materialism “erases the distinction between the willed or chosen, on the one hand, and the inevitable, on the other,” and that the novel plays Lee’s materialism “largely for comedy”; he does not, though, pursue in depth what comedic materialism might mean for how we read the novel (34). Instead, he argues that Lee’s materialism, because it downplays the power of individuals to control their bodies, is part of a wider critique of Jacksonian democracy, a political movement predicated on the idea that the common man is fit to govern himself (36). Justine Murison reads the novel as a satire of “the politics of physiological sympathy” that indicates the absurdity of sympathetically conflating one person with another (27). In this essay I read the novel’s depiction of embodiment as a source of comedy, but my argument differs from prevailing scholarship in that I claim that embodiment itself is the butt of Bird’s joke. I view two comedic forms at play, one of which is satire: like his contemporary and admirer Edgar Allan Poe, who is the likely author of a favorable review of Sheppard Lee in the Southern Literary Messenger, Bird delights in lampooning all elements of Jacksonian life.1 As Murison, especially, emphasizes, Sheppard Lee explores the use of embodiment as a vantage point from which to satirize contemporary politics and culture. Though she and other critics are correct to view Lee as endorsing the view that the body determines the mind, it does not follow to say the same of Bird, as many do; doing so conflates author and narrator. I argue, rather, that Bird finds such views to be laughable. The first part of this essay explores the ways that Lee’s views...

Poe in Cyberspace Technology, Magic, and Quack Physics

Poe in Cyberspace Technology, Magic, and Quack Physics

Obituary Joseph V. Ridgely (1921–2014)

Longtime member of the PSA, Joseph V. Ridgely, Emeritus Professor of English, Columbia University, died September 27, 2014, in Silver Spring, Maryland, where he had resided for many years, commuting via train to Columbia University. Ridgely was a longtime specialist in Southern writers and writing; his books include Nineteenth-century Southern Literature (University of Kentucky Press, 1980), John Pendleton Kennedy (Twayne, 1966), and William Gilmore Simms (Twayne, 1962). He also performed great service to Poe studies by assisting Burton Pollin with the volume on the Southern Literary Messenger, in the Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, for which Pollin served as editor-in-chief. This book was Number 5 in the series. During his long teaching career, Ridgely offered seminars on Poe. In those classes and others, Ridgely inspired generations of students, who enjoyed the course topics and the professor. Although he was long retired, he continued to communicate with and unhesitatingly furnished assistance to seasoned and novice scholars alike. His scholarly enthusiasm and humor will be greatly missed.

Poe Studies Association Updates

Poe Studies Association Updates

A Backward Glance over Some Leading Citizens in the Poe World

Having grown up, academically speaking, in the shadow of Arthur Hobson Quinn, who lived roughly half an hour from my college, Ursinus, and with so many of my college teachers having studied their American literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where Quinn was supreme when American literature was still a fairly new subject in university instruction, and now with myself looking like I might well be a contemporary of Quinn, or even Poe and John Greenleaf Whittier, and being from a family in which genealogy was important, it may be natural that I should represent historical memory and share my recollections of some persons who pioneered in and opened up Poe studies. Some may be surprised to learn that Professor Quinn was, first and foremost, not a Poe specialist, but that his preeminent scholarly love was American drama. For pre-twentieth-century American plays, Quinn’s studies typically remain, after nearly a century, almost the only informed commentaries. Many have become increasingly aware that William Dunlap, America’s first major playwright, and the novelist Charles Brockden Brown, might each properly be deemed the Adam to American literary Gothicism. To return to Professor Quinn: when I began my own academic studies, he was in his eighties, ill, and housebound. He spent most of his time nestled in a chair, swathed in blankets and quilts, and wearing a sun shade, claiming that reading so many early American plays had ruined his eyesight. Before such ills befell him, Quinn was active in having established the Clothier Collection of American Drama at the University of Pennsylvania, which remains one of the foremost collections of early American plays. The Poe interest emerged from Quinn’s own work in American drama—Poe’s parents being actors—and from his aim to furnish an accurate biographical portraiture of Poe which would demolish the long-standing depiction by Rufus Griswold. Spending more than twenty years in preparing that biography, which appeared first in 1941 but has stood the test of time well enough to go through several reprintings, Quinn achieved a solid narrative account, though many of his critical opinions have been modified or superseded in the work of others. A Quinn student, J. Albert Robbins, followed his mentor’s practices in determining to present factually accurate scholarship, as some early volumes in the American Literary Scholarship journal attest. Robbins often recounted to me anecdotes of his days as Quinn’s student. Those who know Quinn primarily for

Deciphering Poe: Subtexts, Contexts, Subversive Meanings

Deciphering Poe: Subtexts, Contexts, Subversive Meanings

John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture by Edward WATTS, and David J. CARLSON (review)

WATTS, Edward, and David J. CARLSON, eds. John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press; Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012. xxxiv + 319 pp. $84.99. As indicated by his various contemporaries as well as by his editors, biographers, and bibliographers, John Neal (1793-1876) has been positioned in American literary history as something of an idiot savant--a fellow and from Portland, Maine, who never quite disciplines himself enough to achieve greatness. Edgar Allan Poe, for example, evaluates corpus in this manner in his 1842 review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales: Some of the pieces of Mr. John Neal abound in vigor and originality; but in general, his compositions of this class are excessively diffuse, extravagant, and indicative of an imperfect sentiment of Art. In his 1845 tale Correspondence, Hawthorne filters his depiction of Neal through P.'s partially disordered reason, while commenting on the state of American letters: How slowly our literature grows up! Most of our writers of promise have come to untimely ends. There was that wild fellow, John Neal, who almost turned my boyish brain with his romances; he surely has long been dead, else he never could keep himself so quiet. In The Southern Literary Messenger in 1849, Poe adds that he should be inclined to rank John Neal first, or at all events second, among our men of indisputable genius. Is it, or is it not fact, that the air of Democracy agrees better with mere Talent than with Genius? Edward Watts and David J. Carlson open their essential collection of essays, John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, by pointing to Hawthorne's inaccurate and provocative comment about silence as illustrative of a focus limited to those forms of aesthetic criticism and literary writing that Neal had largely abandoned by the 1830s (xi). Watts and Carlson draw much-needed, twenty-first-century attention to this American writer, critic, and editor by making sense of the erratic genius that Poe so appreciates. The editors make their case for crucial position within American literary and cultural studies in their introduction, Headlong Enterprise: John Neal and Nineteenth-Century America. They subsequently present thirteen chapters about novels, memoir, criticism, short stories, and other periodical writings from contributors David J. Carlson, Jonathan Elmer, Fritz Fleischmann, Kevin J. Hayes, Kerin Holt, Jeffrey Insko, Maya Merlob, Francesca Orestano, Matthew Pethers, Jorg Thomas Richter, Matthew Wynn Sivils, Edward Watts, and Karen A. Weyler. Taken as whole, Watts and Carlson's collection presents John Neal as significant literary figure as well as an engaged witness to and participant in the major cultural debates of the nineteenth century. writings provide a perspective unusually unencumbered by the anxieties of conventional acceptance or fears of compromised professionalism or genteel acceptability (xxiv). The chapters are positioned chronologically according to publication dates of discussed works, though certain clusters emerge: early romantic fiction, then nationalist criticism, next gothic and frontier themes, regional journalism, and, for the final periods, public advocacy (xxv). For the uninitiated, the above list of topics is too tame description of John Neal offers his readers. Alternatively combative, comedic, fast-moving, and stultifyingly digressive, the writer consistently subverts generic conventions that allow readers to create meaning. Therefore, in his discussion of the romance Seventy-Six: Our Country! Right or Wrong (1823), Jeffrey Insko emphasizes disorderliness (61) and what we might call aesthetic of incoherence (64): Neal's fictional narrative is radical--revolutionary--insofar as it attempts to undo, to circumvent, the inherent tendency of narrative to shape and bestow coherence upon experience (60). …

POE AND THE REMAPPING OF ANTEBELLUM PRINT CULTURE

POE AND THE REMAPPING OF ANTEBELLUM PRINT CULTURE. Ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Jerome McGann. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2012. vii + 271 pp. $45.Since the impact of F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) on the academic study of American literature in the 1950s and 1960s, scholars in the last three decades have debated Matthiessen's criteria for inclusion, his nearly exclusive focus on five major authors (three from New England and two from New York), and the writers excluded from his overall discussion. Notable by his absence in American Renaissance was Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), who represented to Matthiessen the tragic consequences of isolation, a contrast to those writers who consciously or unconsciously confronted a larger social world. If Walt Whitman's poetry represented engagement with the ordinary experiences of the common man, Poe's works, according to Matthiessen, suggested an escape from such concerns, a retreat into a realm out of space and out of time. body of Poe's writings represented the trappings of an abnormal Romantic temperament, a horror and anxiety generated by a tortured sensibility.Several of the contributors of the ten essays in Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture invoke Matthiessen or use his work as a point of departure. Maurice Lee, in particular, does so with a hint of weariness. He duly cites the number of Matthiessen-influenced works-from American Renaissance Reconsidered (1985), edited by Donald Pease and Walter Benn Michaels, and David Reynolds's Beneath the American Renaissance (1988) to more recent studies. He notes, however, that Matthiessen, when currently cited, represents a once-dominant tradition of scholarly inquiry that examined a more manageable canon at a time of an apparent scholarly consensus. Pointing to Poe's critical neglect, according to Lee, seems less compelling today, and his own essay, via a numerical accounting, shows that academic interest in Poe remains strong and shows few signs of abating.The metaphor in the volume's title, addressed by editor J. Gerald Kennedy in his introduction, is mapping, a marker suggesting a decentralized and volatile network of writers, editors, and publishers of varied, competing, and often antagonistic agendas and interests. It was this literary, economic, and social marketplace that Poe, the magazine editor aspiring for independence, aimed to negotiate and control. As the contributors demonstrate, however, he was often the victim of his own assertiveness and was subject to forces in the publishing milieu, most notably a vast culture of reprinting, that he failed to master.Kennedy seizes on the metaphor of mapping in his opening essay, which focuses on Poe's mixture of literary criticism and gossip, The Literati of New York City (1846). Despite acknowledgment that the series was a random selection of his New York contemporaries, the compilation constituted a fairly systematic appraisal of antebellum authors, including portraits of every person of literary note in (24). Clergymen, politicians, and scholars appeared alongside poets and fiction writers, and Poe took pains to include over two dozen editors of periodicals, fellow arbiters of literary taste. Kennedy charts the course from Poe's early Autography installments in the Southern Literary Messenger (1836), to the Autography series in Graham's Magazine in 1841-42, to the Literati. All these efforts led Poe toward a plan in the last years of his life for a more ambitious project on American authors and their literary productions. If Kennedy's essay elaborates on Burton R. Pollin's pioneering work in presenting the notes and outline for Living Writers of America (Studies in the American Renaissance, 1991), a project Poe never completed, persuasive claims are made for Poe's achievements in broadening the scope of American letters by including profiles of women writers, practitioners in a diversity of genres, and figures from different regions. …

POE AND THE REMAPPING OF ANTEBELLUM PRINT CULTURE

POE AND THE REMAPPING OF ANTEBELLUM PRINT CULTURE. Ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Jerome McGann. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2012. vii + 271 pp. $45.Since the impact of F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) on the academic study of American literature in the 1950s and 1960s, scholars in the last three decades have debated Matthiessen's criteria for inclusion, his nearly exclusive focus on five major authors (three from New England and two from New York), and the writers excluded from his overall discussion. Notable by his absence in American Renaissance was Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), who represented to Matthiessen the tragic consequences of isolation, a contrast to those writers who consciously or unconsciously confronted a larger social world. If Walt Whitman's poetry represented engagement with the ordinary experiences of the common man, Poe's works, according to Matthiessen, suggested an escape from such concerns, a retreat into a realm out of space and out of time. The body of Poe's writings represented the trappings of an abnormal Romantic temperament, a horror and anxiety generated by a tortured sensibility.Several of the contributors of the ten essays in Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture invoke Matthiessen or use his work as a point of departure. Maurice Lee, in particular, does so with a hint of weariness. He duly cites the number of Matthiessen-influenced works-from The American Renaissance Reconsidered (1985), edited by Donald Pease and Walter Benn Michaels, and David Reynolds's Beneath the American Renaissance (1988) to more recent studies. He notes, however, that Matthiessen, when currently cited, represents a once-dominant tradition of scholarly inquiry that examined a more manageable canon at a time of an apparent scholarly consensus. Pointing to Poe's critical neglect, according to Lee, seems less compelling today, and his own essay, via a numerical accounting, shows that academic interest in Poe remains strong and shows few signs of abating.The metaphor in the volume's title, addressed by editor J. Gerald Kennedy in his introduction, is mapping, a marker suggesting a decentralized and volatile network of writers, editors, and publishers of varied, competing, and often antagonistic agendas and interests. It was this literary, economic, and social marketplace that Poe, the magazine editor aspiring for independence, aimed to negotiate and control. As the contributors demonstrate, however, he was often the victim of his own assertiveness and was subject to forces in the publishing milieu, most notably a vast culture of reprinting, that he failed to master.Kennedy seizes on the metaphor of mapping in his opening essay, which focuses on Poe's mixture of literary criticism and gossip, "The Literati of New York City" (1846). Despite acknowledgment that the series was a random selection of his New York contemporaries, the compilation constituted a fairly systematic appraisal of antebellum authors, including portraits of "every person of literary note in America" (24). Clergymen, politicians, and scholars appeared alongside poets and fiction writers, and Poe took pains to include over two dozen editors of periodicals, fellow arbiters of literary taste. Kennedy charts the course from Poe's early "Autography" installments in the Southern Literary Messenger (1836), to the "Autography" series in Graham's Magazine in 1841-42, to the "Literati." All these efforts led Poe toward a plan in the last years of his life for a more ambitious project on American authors and their literary productions. If Kennedy's essay elaborates on Burton R. Pollin's pioneering work in presenting the notes and outline for The Living Writers of America (Studies in the American Renaissance, 1991), a project Poe never completed, persuasive claims are made for Poe's achievements in broadening the scope of American letters by including profiles of women writers, practitioners in a diversity of genres, and figures from different regions. …

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

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

Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture

Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture

Civil War Literature and Nationalism

Civil War Literature and Nationalism Timothy Sweet (bio) Apples and Ashes: Literature, Nationalism, and the Confederate States of America. By Coleman Hutchison. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2012. xiii + 277 pp. $69.95 cloth. $24.95 paper. To Fight Aloud is Very Brave: American Poetry and the Civil War. By Faith Barrett. U of Massachusetts P, 2012. xv + 336 pp. $80.00 cloth. $27.95 paper. In his 1962 assessment of Civil War poetry, Edmund Wilson’s impatience with the rhetoric of nationhood led him to dismiss Civil War poetry as so much “patriotic journalism” and to praise instead poets who developed a “more personal kind of self-expression” by ignoring the war altogether (Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman) or approaching it only obliquely (Sidney Lanier). By 2012, it has become impossible to imagine that any study of Civil War poetry would not engage questions of nationalism. Coleman Hutchison and Faith Barrett each illustrate the gulf between 1962 when Wilson valorized the personal over the political and 2012. Each cites Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) to illuminate the way Civil War poetry expresses the relation between literature and nationalism. Each demonstrates with close-readings how texts shaped and were shaped by contexts of production, circulation, and reception. Although Confederate nationalism has received substantial scholarly attention, especially following Drew Gilpin Faust’s The Creation of Confederate Nationalism (1988), its associated literature has suffered neglect. As Hutchison observes, [End Page 136] most scholars have concluded that “there wasn’t much of the stuff, and in any case it wasn’t very good.” Without addressing quality, Hutchison demonstrates that “the Confederacy gave rise to a robust literary culture.” In examining this archive as a test case for Anderson’s account of modern nation-building, Hutchison looks deeply at a few instances, as compared for example with the broad survey approach taken by Michael Bernath’s Confederate Minds (2010). Much more extensively than Bernath, Hutchison emphasizes the international context of Confederate nationalism and its literature. Literary criticism, poetry, and popular song alike provide Hutchison’s evidence for the idea that the Confederacy was a “nation struggling to write itself into existence.” Examinations of the pro-Confederate, London-based periodical The Index and especially the long running Southern Literary Messenger demonstrate the importance of literary criticism. (Chapters on poetry and song will be discussed below in conjunction with Barrett’s study.) Readers may wish that Hutchison had also devoted a chapter to the genre of popular history—for example, Edward A. Pollard’s series, which began in 1862 and culminated in 1866 with The Lost Cause. Other genres bear disproportionate weight in his argument, as in the chapter on the Confederate national novel. By Hutchison’s count, only seven original book-length works of fiction were published in the Confederacy during the war, and of these only one seems to have been popular enough to support claims of cultural influence: Augusta Jane Evans’s Macaria; or, the Altars of Sacrifice (1864). This text sold some twenty thousand copies (about as many as The Scarlet Letter sold during Hawthorne’s lifetime). Memoir, which emerged out of Confederate nationalism after the demise of its state apparatus, is represented not by the numerous examples that promoted a Lost Cause ideology but rather by an anomaly, Loreta Janeta Velazquez’s The Woman in Battle (1876). Whereas previous work has focused on gender, Hutchison’s new approach to this text by way of nationalism maps Velazquez’s geographical “restlessness” onto the international context of the Confederacy and the war. Barrett approaches the question of nationalism through poetic form, particularly “voice-effects”: modes of address, pronoun usages (actual or implied), song-like structures, and similar formal features that specify an audience’s relation to a text. Working in the vein of historical poetics opened by scholars such as Paula Bennett and Virginia Jackson, Barrett reminds us of the prominence of poetry and song in mid-century American culture. Arguing that the war reshaped American poetics as poets discovered new permeability in the conventional “boundaries between ‘civic’ and ‘private’ stances,” Barrett asks us to reconsider the definition of lyric subjectivity we have inherited from modernism. Chapters address popular [End...

Oh, Tempora! Oh, Mores! Oh, Didier!

Oh, Tempora! Oh, Mores! Oh, Didier!

A Nation of the Continual Present: Timrod, Tennyson, and the Memorialization of the Confederacy

A New York Times article dated May 13, 1899, quotes Alfred Lord Tennyson praising Henry Timrod as poet laureate of the (Thomas BR315). (1) Though the story is difficult to verify--Tennyson had been dead for seven years when the review was published--the title clung to Timrod and is still regularly used to describe the nineteenth-century South Carolinian poet. Less well known than Tennyson, Great Britain's Poet Laureate, Timrod nonetheless played a significant role in articulating southern identity during and after the Civil War. anecdote illustrates an important link between Tennyson and Timrod: each man served as a national spokesperson for his geographical region--Victorian England for Tennyson and the Confederate South for Timrod--in the midst of an unstable political era. While James W. Hood has recently identified connections between the gender politics in Timrod's southern community and Tennyson's imaginary world, little has been said about correlations between the poets' visions of nationalism. In fact, current scholarship overlooks most connections between the two writers. This is surprising because in the late nineteenth century, the literary world rarely mentioned Timrod without referencing Tennyson. In an 1886 article in Columbia's State, for instance, Maud Dickson describes Timrod as Tennyson of South Carolina (9). Similarly, discussions about Tennyson often note his influence on Timrod. In Sewanee Review of 1893, for example, Henry E. Shepherd compares Timrod's writing to Tennyson's In Memoriam, pointing to Timrod's appropriation of the peculiar rhyming combination of the poem (407). Shepherd writes: this renowned stanza has been thrilled with the breath of a new life by a Southern poet, whose lips were touched by a live coal from off the altar (408). (2) With rare exceptions like Hood, however, these numerous associations of the two poets have largely been left unexamined by recent scholarship. As a result, it is easy to minimize the complexity both of Timrod's work and the context in which it was read in the postbellum South. After publishing one favorably received book, in 1859, Timrod's writing became increasingly political as tensions between the North and South escalated. His appeared in publications ranging from local Charleston newspapers to Russell's Magazine to the influential Southern Literary Messenger, giving him a broad southern readership (Barrett and Miller 311). At the beginning of the Civil War, Timrod's imagined a South that had successfully seceded from the North and established itself as a thriving state. He used a poetic model to express his political argument and reflect the common rhetoric of southern secession. In Overreading Tennyson: Antebellum Appropriations of the Lady Poems, Hood asserts that Timrod and other American appropriators in the antebellum used Tennyson's poetry to advance their own political purposes by promoting a strict gender hierarchy (76). Hood contends that such as Timrod's (inspired by Tennyson's poem of the same name) replace complex females with flat, overidealized ones. Where Tennyson presents a woman who is paradoxically active and passive, strong and weak, assertive and submissive, Timrod gives readers a less complicated ... ethereally divine and completely submissive Isabel (79). While Hood maintains that such adaptations of Tennyson's lady poems point to Timrod's political agenda of subduing women, I suggest that these represent a desire to regulate not only women, but people in several social positions, including the African slave. I argue that Timrod patterns his independent southern nation after the Camelot of Tennyson's The Epic / Morte d'Arthur (1842) and Guinevere (1859), and that his vision extends beyond gender. He appropriates Tennyson's language and Camelot motifs for two related but distinct visions: first, in such as Ethnogenesis (1861), he imagines an independent southern political community characterized by a white patriarchy dependent on slavery. …