Nineteenth-century American literature is often divided into two asymmetrical halves, neatly separated by the Civil War. Focusing on the later writings of Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, this book shows how the war took shape across the nineteenth century, inflecting literary forms for decades after 1865.

How did Americans imagine the Civil War before it happened? The most anticipated event of the nineteenth century appeared in novels, prophecies, dreams, diaries, speeches, and newspapers decades before the first shots at Fort Sumter. People forecasted a frontier filibuster, an economic clash between free and slave labor, a race war, a revolution, a war for liberation, and Armageddon. Reading their premonitions reveals how several factors, including race, religion, age, gender, region, and class, shaped what people thought about the future and how they imagined it. Some Americans pictured the future as an open, contested era that they progressed toward and molded with their thoughts and actions. Others saw the future as a closed, predetermined world that approached them and sealed their fate. When the war began, these opposing temporalities informed how Americans grasped and waged the conflict. In this creative history, Jason Phillips explains how the expectations of a host of characters-generals, politicians, radicals, citizens, and slaves-affected how people understood the unfolding drama and acted when the future became present. He reconsiders the war's origins without looking at sources using hindsight, that is, without considering what caused the cataclysm and whether it was inevitable. As a result, Phillips dispels a popular myth that all Americans thought the Civil War would be short and glorious at the outset, a ninety-day affair full of fun and adventure. Much more than rational power games played by elites, the war was shaped by uncertainties and emotions and darkened horizons that changed over time. Looming Civil War highlights how individuals approached an ominous future with feelings, thoughts, and perspectives different from our sensibilities and unconnected to our view of their world. Civil War Americans had their own prospects to ponder and forge as they discovered who they were and where life would lead them. The Civil War changed more than America's future; it transformed how Americans imagined the future and how Americans have thought about the future ever since.

American literature in the nineteenth century is often divided into two asymmetrical halves, neatly separated by the Civil War. In Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War, Cody Marrs argues that the war is a far more elastic boundary for literary history than has frequently been assumed. Focusing on the later writings of Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, this book shows how the war took imaginative shape across, and even beyond, the nineteenth century, inflecting literary forms and expressions for decades after 1865. These writers, Marrs demonstrates, are best understood not as antebellum or postbellum figures but as transbellum authors who cipher their later experiences through their wartime impressions and prewar ideals. This book is a bold, revisionary contribution to debates about temporality, periodization, and the shape of American literary history.

This book is the first omnibus history of the literature of the American Civil War, the deadliest conflict in US history. A History of American Civil War Literature examines the way in which the war has been remembered and rewritten over time in prose, poems, and other narratives. This history incorporates new directions in Civil War historiography and cultural studies while giving equal attention to writings from both northern and southern states. It redresses the traditional neglect of southern literary cultures by moving between the North and the South, thus finding a balance between Union and Confederate texts. Written by leading scholars in the field, this book works to redefine the boundaries of American Civil War literature while posing a fundamental question: why does this 150-year-old conflict continue to capture the American imagination?

Consolidating one of the most complex and multi-faceted eras in American History, this new edition of Jonathan Wells’s A House Divided unifies the broad and varied scholarship on the American Civil War. Amassing a variety of research, this accessible and readable text introduces readers to both the war and the Reconstruction period, and how Americans lived during this time of great upheaval in the country's history. Designed for a variety of subjects and teaching styles, this text not only looks at the Civil War from a historical perspective, but also analyzes its ramifications on the United States and American identities through the present day. This second edition has been updated throughout, incorporating new scholarship from recent studies on the Civil War era, and includes additional photographs and maps (now incorporated throughout the text), updated bibliographies, and a supplementary companion website.

Stacey Margolis rethinks a key chapter in American literary history, challenging the idea that nineteenth-century American culture was dominated by an ideology of privacy that defined subjects in terms of their intentions and desires. She reveals how writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Henry James depicted a world in which characters could only be understood—and, more importantly, could only understand themselves—through their public actions. She argues that the social issues that nineteenth-century novelists analyzed—including race, sexuality, the market, and the law—formed integral parts of a broader cultural shift toward understanding individuals not according to their feelings, desires, or intentions, but rather in light of the various inevitable traces they left on the world. Margolis provides readings of fiction by Hawthorne and James as well as Susan Warner, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and Pauline Hopkins. In these writers’ works, she traces a distinctive novelistic tradition that viewed social developments—such as changes in political partisanship and childhood education and the rise of new politico-legal forms like negligence law—as means for understanding how individuals were shaped by their interactions with society. The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature adds a new level of complexity to understandings of nineteenth-century American culture by illuminating a literary tradition full of accidents, mistakes, and unintended consequences—one in which feelings and desires were often overshadowed by all that was external to the self.

Buying and Selling Civil War Memory explores the ways in which Gilded Age manufacturers, advertisers, publishers, and others commercialized Civil War memory. Advertisers used images of the war to sell everything from cigarettes to sewing machines; an entire industry grew up around uniforms made for veterans rather than soldiers; publishing houses built subscription bases by tapping into wartime loyalties; while old and young alike found endless sources of entertainment that harkened back to the war. Moving beyond the discussions of how Civil War memory shaped politics and race relations, the essays assembled by James Marten and Caroline E. Janney provide a new framework for examining the intersections of material culture, consumerism, and contested memory in the everyday lives of late nineteenth-century Americans. Each essay offers a case study of a product, experience, or idea related to how the Civil War was remembered and memorialized. Taken together, these essays trace the ways the buying and selling of the Civil War shaped Americans’ thinking about the conflict, making an important contribution to scholarship on Civil War memory and extending our understanding of subjects as varied as print, visual, and popular culture; finance; and the histories of education, of the book, and of capitalism in this period. This highly teachable volume presents an exciting intellectual fusion by bringing the subfield of memory studies into conversation with the literature on material culture. The volume’s contributors include Amanda Brickell Bellows, Crompton B. Burton, Kevin R. Caprice, Shae Smith Cox, Barbara A. Gannon, Edward John Harcourt, Anna Gibson Holloway, Jonathan S. Jones, Margaret Fairgrieve Milanick, John Neff , Paul Ringel, Natalie Sweet, David K. Thomson, and Jonathan W. White.