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Author: Masahiro Nakamura Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press ISBN: 9781570038174 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 246
Book Description
One of nineteenth-century America's foremost men of letters, William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) of Charleston, South Carolina, distinguished himself as a historian, poet, and novelist; yet his stalwart allegiance to the ideals of the Confederacy have kept him largely marginalized from the modern literary canon. In this engaging study, Masahiro Nakamura seeks to reinsert Simms in current American literary and cultural studies through a careful consideration of Simms's southern conservatism as a valuable literary counterpoint to the bourgeois individualist ideology of his northern contemporaries. For Nakamura, Simms's vision of social order runs contrary to the staunch individualism expressed in traditional American romances by authors such as James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In his thoughtful approaches to Simms's historical depictions of the making of American history and society, Nakamura finds consistent assertions of social order against the perils of literal and metaphoric wilderness, a conservative vision that he traces to the influence of Simms's southern genius loci. To understand how this southern conservatism also manifests itself in Simms's fiction, Nakamura contrasts Simms's historical romances with those of Hawthorne, as representative of the New England romance tradition, to differentiate the ways in which the two writers interpret the dynamic between the individual and society. Nakamura finds that Simms's protagonists struggle to establish their places within their culture while Hawthorne's characters are often at odds with their culture. The resulting comparison enriches our understanding of both writers.
Author: Masahiro Nakamura Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press ISBN: 9781570038174 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 246
Book Description
One of nineteenth-century America's foremost men of letters, William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) of Charleston, South Carolina, distinguished himself as a historian, poet, and novelist; yet his stalwart allegiance to the ideals of the Confederacy have kept him largely marginalized from the modern literary canon. In this engaging study, Masahiro Nakamura seeks to reinsert Simms in current American literary and cultural studies through a careful consideration of Simms's southern conservatism as a valuable literary counterpoint to the bourgeois individualist ideology of his northern contemporaries. For Nakamura, Simms's vision of social order runs contrary to the staunch individualism expressed in traditional American romances by authors such as James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In his thoughtful approaches to Simms's historical depictions of the making of American history and society, Nakamura finds consistent assertions of social order against the perils of literal and metaphoric wilderness, a conservative vision that he traces to the influence of Simms's southern genius loci. To understand how this southern conservatism also manifests itself in Simms's fiction, Nakamura contrasts Simms's historical romances with those of Hawthorne, as representative of the New England romance tradition, to differentiate the ways in which the two writers interpret the dynamic between the individual and society. Nakamura finds that Simms's protagonists struggle to establish their places within their culture while Hawthorne's characters are often at odds with their culture. The resulting comparison enriches our understanding of both writers.
Author: Mary Ann Wimsatt Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 9780807125267 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 328
Book Description
William Gilmore Simms (1806–1870) was the preeminent southern man of letters in the antebellum period, a prolific, talented writer in many genres and an eloquent intellectual spokesman of r his region. During his long career, he wrote plays, poetry, literary criticism, biography and history; but he is best remembered for his numerous novels and tales. Many Ann Wimsatt provides the first significant full-length evaluation of Simms’s achievement in his long fiction, selected poetry, essays, and short fiction. Wimsatt’s chief emphasis is on the thirty-odd novels that Simms published from the mid-1830s until after the Civil War. In bringing his impressive body of work to life, she makes use of biographical and historical information and also of twentieth-century literary theories of the romance, Simm’s principal genre. Through analyses of such seminal works as Guy Rivers, The Yemassee, The Cassique of Kiawah, and Woodcraft, Wimsatt illuminates Simm’s contributions to the romance tradition—contributions misunderstood by previous critics—and suggests how to view his novels within the light of recent literary criticism. She also demonstrates how Simms used the historical conditions of southern culture as well as events of his own life to flesh out literary patterns, and she analyzes his use of low-country, frontier and mountain settings. Although critics praised Simms early in his career as “the first American novelist of the day,” the panic of 1837 and the changes in the book market that it helped foster severely damaged his prospects for wealth and fame. The financial recession, Wimsatt finds, together with shifts in literary taste, contributed to the decline of Simms’s reputation. Simms attempted to adjust to the changing climate for fiction by incorporating two modes of nineteenth-century realism, the satiric portrayal of southern manners and southern backwoods humor, into the framework of his long romances; but his accomplishments in these areas have been undervalued or misunderstood by critics since is time. Wimsatt’s book is the first to survey Simms’s fiction and much of his other writing against the background of his life and literary career and the first to make extensive use of his immense correspondence. It is an important study of a neglected author who once served as the leafing symbol of literary activity in the South. It fills what has heretofore been a serious gap in southern literary studies.
Author: William Gilmore Simms Publisher: University of Arkansas Press ISBN: 9781557285409 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 182
Book Description
Delivered as a three-part lecture series in 1854 at the famous Hibernian Society Hall in Charleston, South Carolina, Simms's spirited defense of poetry stands in the nobel line of poetic credos from poets such as Sir Philip Sidney and Percy Bysshe Shelley. It is the only full-length work of its kind in American literature, and it has never before been published. Seventh in the University of Arkansas Press's Simms Series, Poetry and the Practical is a clear, forceful rebuttal of arguments that would relegate poetry to the margins of life. It proclaims the high calling of poets as spokesmen and romantic visionaries, underscoring their mission to reveal truth and passion, mind and heart and to transcend the limiting bounds of the empirical. In proving poetry's utility and worth, Simms uses all the tools of persuasion open to him: his wide reading, his considerable knowledge of the history of culture and civilizations, his understanding of the values of place and tradition, and, above all, an oratorical eloquence, which allows his words to leave the page in a rush of inspiration. These lectures, which still retain their identity as scripts prepared and punctuated for performance, provide profound insight into Simms the poet and into the effects of industrialization, the southern sensibility, and the influence of European thought on southern literature at a critical point in that literature's development.
Author: Todd Hagstette Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press ISBN: 1611177731 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 632
Book Description
Engaging approaches to the vast output of South Carolina's premier man of letters William Gilmore Simms was the best known and certainly the most accomplished writer of the mid-nineteenth-century South. His literary ascent began early, with his first book being published when he was nineteen years old and his reputation as a literary genius secured before he turned thirty. Over a career that spanned nearly forty-five years, he established himself as the American South's premier man of letters—an accomplished poet, novelist, short fiction writer, essayist, historian, dramatist, cultural journalist, biographer, and editor. In Reading William Gilmore Simms, Todd Hagstette has created an anthology of critical introductions to Simms's major publications, including those recently brought back into print by the University of South Carolina Press, offering the first ever primer compendium of the author's vast output. Simms was a Renaissance man of American letters, lauded in his time by both popular audiences and literary icons alike. Yet the author's extensive output, which includes nearly eighty published volumes, can be a barrier to his study. To create a gateway to reading and studying Simms, Hagstette has assembled thirty-eight essays by twenty-four scholars to review fifty-five Simms works. Addressing all the author's major works, the essays provide introductory information and scholarly analysis of the most crucial features of Simms's literary achievement. Arranged alphabetically by title for easy access, the book also features a topical index for more targeted inquiry into Simms's canon. Detailing the great variety and astonishing consistency of Simms's thought throughout his long career as well as examining his posthumous reconsideration, Reading William Gilmore Simms bridges the author's genius and readers' growing curiosity. The only work of its kind, this book provides an essential passport to the far-flung worlds of Simms's fecund imagination.
Author: John Caldwell Guilds Publisher: University of Georgia Press ISBN: 9780820318875 Category : Poetry Languages : en Pages : 296
Book Description
William Gilmore Simms (1807-1870), the antebellum South's foremost author and cultural critic, was the first advocate of regionalism in the creation of national literature. This collection of essays emphasizes his portrayal of America's westward migration.
Author: Jeffery J. Rogers Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 1498502024 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 223
Book Description
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.
Author: Louis P. Masur Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199726868 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 316
Book Description
"These thousands, and tens and twenties of thousands of American young men, badly wounded, all sorts of wounds, operated on, pallid with diarrhea, languishing, dying with fever, pneumonia, &c. open a new world somehow to me, giving closer insights, new things, exploring deeper mines than any yet, showing our humanity, (I sometimes put myself in fancy in the cot, with typhoid, or under the knife,) tried by terrible, fearfulest tests, probed deepest, the living soul's, the body's tragedies, bursting the petty bounds of art." So wrote Walt Whitman in March of 1863, in a letter telling friends in New York what he had witnessed in Washington's war hospitals. In this, we see both a description of war's ravages and a major artist's imaginative response to the horrors of war as it "bursts the petty bounds of art." In "...the real war will never get in the books", Louis Masur has brought together fourteen of the most eloquent and articulate writers of the Civil War period, including such major literary figures as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, and Louisa May Alcott. Drawing on a wide range of material, including diaries, letters, and essays, Masur captures the reactions of these writers as the war was waged, providing a broad spectrum of views. Emerson, for instance, sees the war "come as a frosty October, which shall restore intellectual & moral power to these languid & dissipated populations." African-American writer Charlotte Forten writes sadly of the slaughter at Fort Wagner: "It seems very, very hard that the best and noblest must be the earliest called away. Especially has it been so throughout this dreadful war." There are writings by soldiers in combat. John Esten Cooke, a writer of popular pre-Revolutionary romances serving as a Confederate soldier under J.E.B. Stuart, describes Stonewall Jackson's uniform: "It was positively scorched by sun--had that dingy hue, the product of sun and rain, and contact with the ground...but the men of the old Stonewall Brigade loved that coat." And John De Forest, a Union officer, describes facing a Confederate volley: "It was a long rattle like that which a boy makes in running with a stick along a picket-fence, only vastly louder; and at the same time the sharp, quiet whit-whit of bullets chippered close to our ears." And along the way, we sample many vivid portraits of the era, perhaps the most surprising of which is Louisa May Alcott's explanation of why she preferred her noon-to-midnight schedule in a Washington hospital: "I like it as it leaves me time for a morning run which is what I need to keep well....I trot up & down the streets in all directions, some times to the Heights, then half way to Washington, again to the hill over which the long trains of army wagons are constantly vanishing & ambulances appearing. That way the fighting lies, & I long to follow." With unmatched intimacy and immediacy, "...the real war will never get in the books" illuminates the often painful intellectual and emotional efforts of fourteen accomplished writers as they come to grips with "The American Apocalypse."
Author: Eileen K. Cheng Publisher: University of Georgia Press ISBN: 0820330736 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 381
Book Description
American historians of the early national period, argues Eileen Ka-May Cheng, grappled with objectivity, professionalism, and other “modern” issues to a greater degree than their successors in later generations acknowledge. Her extensive readings of antebellum historians show that by the 1820s, a small but influential group of practitioners had begun to develop many of the doctrines and concerns that undergird contemporary historical practice. The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth challenges the entrenched notion that America’s first generations of historians were romantics or propagandists for a struggling young nation. Cheng engages with the works of well-known early national historians like George Bancroft, William Prescott, and David Ramsay; such lesser-known figures as Jared Sparks and Lorenzo Sabine; and leading political and intellectual elites of the day, including Francis Bowen and Charles Francis Adams. She shows that their work, which focused on the American Revolution, was often nuanced and surprisingly sympathetic in its treatment of American Indians and loyalists. She also demonstrates how the rise of the novel contributed to the emergence of history as an autonomous discipline, arguing that paradoxically “early national historians at once described truth in opposition to the novel and were influenced by the novel in their understanding of truth.” Modern historians should recognize that the discipline of history is itself a product of history, says Cheng. By taking seriously a group of too-often-dismissed historians, she challenges contemporary historians to examine some ahistorical aspects of the way they understand their own discipline.
Author: Colin Woodard Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0525560173 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 433
Book Description
A Christian Science Monitor best book of 2020 "Relentlessly accessible. . . . This is that rare history that tells what influential thinkers failed to think, what famous writers left unwritten." --Jill Leovy, The American Scholar By the bestselling author of American Nations, the story of how the myth of U.S. national unity was created and fought over in the nineteenth century--a myth that continues to affect us today Union tells the story of the struggle to create a national myth for the United States, one that could hold its rival regional cultures together and forge an American nationhood. On one hand, a small group of individuals--historians, political leaders, and novelists--fashioned and promoted the idea of America as nation that had a God-given mission to lead humanity toward freedom, equality, and self-government. But this emerging narrative was swiftly contested by another set of intellectuals and firebrands who argued that the United States was instead the homeland of the allegedly superior "Anglo-Saxon" race, upon whom divine and Darwinian favor shined. Colin Woodard tells the story of the genesis and epic confrontations between these visions of our nation's path and purpose through the lives of the key figures who created them, a cast of characters whose personal quirks and virtues, gifts and demons shaped the destiny of millions.
Author: Masahiro Nakamura
Author: Masahiro Nakamura
Author: Mary Ann Wimsatt
Author: William Gilmore Simms
Author: Todd Hagstette
Author: John Caldwell Guilds
Author: Jeffery J. Rogers
Author: Louis P. Masur
Author: Eileen K. Cheng
Author: Colin Woodard
Author: Mark Royden Winchell