Late-19th-Century Literature

The predominant subject this year is war, both literal and figurative. The lasting impact of the Civil War is traced through such topics as racial and gender identity, region, family, community, public policy, citizenship, and censorship, not to mention literary style and form. Similarly, other historical instances of imperialism also provide for some rich and engaging analyses. Implicit throughout much of this scholarship, moreover, is the continuing redefinition of regionalism as something other than the negative half of a historical binary contrasted with nation or "East Coast" or "Boston/New York." Two biographies of Charlotte Perkins Gilman add much-needed understanding and context about her work and lead the way in another productive year for Gilman studies, while scholarship on Pauline E. Hopkins remains strong and work on Sarah Orne Jewett actually appears to be picking up again. Far less extensive is the year's scholarship on Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris— discussions of their works are more likely to appear in brief sections of wider-ranging monographs than in sustained and detailed separate analyses. Essay collections on the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt, however, confirm their growing interest to scholars, while an extensive analysis of Mary Chesnut's Civil War diary promises to reposition her as more than an eyewitness to history.

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A trio of books focusing on the presentation and analysis of primary texts affords fresh glimpses into the ways in which the Civil War was subject to interpretation by those who lived through it. Frequently consulted for their historical value, Mary Chesnut's diaries receive a bold and persuasive interpretation as literature in Julia A. Stern's Mary Chesnut's Civil War Epic (Chicago). Stern demonstrates how the original text, written during the war itself, had become through extensive revision a sustained, literary treatment of the war's emotional and social toll. Through the critical lens of the epic tale Stern compellingly positions the 1880s version of Chesnut's text as a significant contribution to literary history, particularly in its participation in the shift from antebellum sentiment to realism. Also providing literary evidence of how the war affected lives, Rebecca Harding Davis's Stories of the Civil War Era: Selected Writings from the Borderlands, ed. Sharon M. Harris and Robin L. Cadwallader (Georgia), makes available ten well-annotated stories, published both during the war and in the decade after, that chronicle in alternating romantic and realistic modes the effects of the conflict on small town and farm families, particularly on girls and women. And finally, in Civil War Humor (Miss.) Cameron C. Nickels provides a useful, popular-culture-based analysis of verbal and visual humor published during the war years. Richly illustrated with editorial cartoons, broadsides, and songs and well supported with useful excerpts of prose and poetry, Nickels's critical survey reveals how people in both the North and the South made sense of the war, pursued its political and cultural goals, and ultimately reflected in the wide range of their humor the period's prejudices and fears.

Expanding the idea of war metaphorically to take in the century as a whole, even while maintaining the Civil War as a central pivot point of history, Michael T. Gilmore's The War on Words offers a thought-provoking interpretation of "the perseverance of the censor's presence" from the antebellum period through the end of Reconstruction. Examining the ways in which certain utterances about race and equality were stifled or left entirely unspoken, Gilmore describes a century marked by silences and elisions, the traces of which may nevertheless be found in the pairings of discourses marked by "romanticism and antislavery, and realism and the repudiation of racial equality." Among the authors of the period that Gilmore considers are Albion Tourgée, Charles Chesnutt, and Stephen Crane. Also interested in the century as a whole, Jennifer Rae Greeson's deeply engaging Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature (Harvard) explores the extent to which writing in the 18th and 19th centuries deployed specific versions of the "South" as both other and home in the development...