19th-century American letters
A01=Martin Griffin
ambivalence toward victory
Ambrose Bierce short stories
American Civil War memory
Author_Martin Griffin
Category=DSBF
Civil War commemoration
Civil War cultural identity
Civil War nostalgia
collective memory and literature
cultural critique of Civil War memory
cultural memory in 19th-century America
elegy and historical consciousness
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
examining postwar American literature
Henry James The Bostonians analysis
Herman Melville war poetry
historical and symbolic representation
historical memory in fiction
ideological memory of the war
irony in postwar literature
James Russell Lowell Harvard Commemoration Ode
literary analysis of historical events
literary commemoration practices
literary engagement with history
literary interpretation of war
literature of mourning and loss
literature of reconciliation
literature of vict
memorializing the Civil War
memory and legacy of conflict
memory and national identity
North-South relations in literature
Northern literary memorials
Northern perspective on Southern defeat
Northern poetic traditions
Northern writers and Civil War reflection
Paul Laurence Dunbar elegy
poetry and fiction after the Civil War
poetry as historical reflection
political memory and literature
postwar American fiction
postwar American literary studies
postwar literary responses
postwar Northern literature
racial themes in postwar writing
reconciliation narratives
representation of war trauma
Robert Gould Shaw tribute
symbolic and historical writing
symbolic meanings of conflict
Product details
- ISBN 9781558496903
- Weight: 412g
- Dimensions: 151 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 11 Feb 2009
- Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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This book discusses how Northern writers came to grips with the mixed legacy of the Civil War.The memory of the American Civil War took many forms over the decades after the conflict ended: personal, social, religious, and political. It was also remembered and commemorated by poets and fiction writers who understood that the war had bequeathed both historical and symbolic meanings to American culture. Although the defeated Confederacy became best known for producing a literature of nostalgia and an ideological defensiveness intended to protect the South's own version of history, authors loyal to the Union also confronted the question of what the memory of the war signified, and how to shape the literary response to that individual and collective experience.In ""Ashes of the Mind"", Martin Griffin examines the work of five Northerners - three poets and two fiction writers - who over a period of four decades tried to understand and articulate the landscape of memory in postwar America, and in particular in that part of the nation that could, with most justification, claim the victory of its beliefs and values. The book begins with an examination of the rhetorical grandeur of James Russell Lowell's ""Harvard Commemoration Ode"", ranges across Herman Melville's ironic war poetry, Henry James' novel of North-South reconciliation, ""The Bostonians"", and Ambrose Bierce's short stories, and ends with the bitter meditation on race and nation presented by Paul Laurence Dunbar's elegy ""Robert Gould Shaw."" Together these texts reveal how a group of representative Northern writers were haunted in different ways by the memory of the conflict and its fraught legacy.Griffin traces a concern with individual and community loss, ambivalence toward victory, and a changing politics of commemoration in the writings of Lowell, Melville, James, Bierce, and Dunbar. What links these very different authors is a Northern memory of the war that became more complex and more compromised as the century went on, often replacing a sense of justification and achievement with a perception of irony and failed promise.
MARTIN GRIFFIN is assistant professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
