In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 For nearly 150 years there has seemingly been a critical consensus that Confederate imaginative literature is not worthy of extensive consideration. Despite consistent, even obsessive interest in the most obscure aspects of American Civil War culture, literary historians have largely ignored the poetry, fiction, drama, music, and criticism produced in the Confederate States of America between 1861 and 1865. When literary historians have engaged this literature, it has often been in a comparative mode, with Confederate literary culture read in relation to a much more developed U.S. literary culture. Not surprisingly, such a methodology has led to two conclusions about the literature of the Confederate States: There wasn’t much of the stuff, and in any case it wasn’t very good. For instance, the two best-known literary studies of the American Civil War, Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore (1962) and Daniel Aaron’s The Unwritten War (1973), both assume the meagerness of Confederate literary culture . As a result, Wilson and Aaron base their discussions of the Confederacy almost entirely on postwar, retrospective southern publications. While Wilson finds flashes of brilliance in writers like Mary Chesnut (whose diaries were heavily revised after the war and not published until the early twentieth century), Aaron remains unconvinced, declaring that “[v]ery little fiction or poetry written in the South during the War came to much” (234).1 Unfortunately, Confederate literature has not fared much better when placed in broader literary contexts. It has garnered only scant attention from southern literary studies, the disciplinary field perhaps best positioned to give an account of it. This has led one Civil War historian to conclude that Confederate literature is the “perennial poor relation of Southern literature” (Muhlenfeld 178). If southern literary studies has neglected its Confederate cousin, then nineteenth-century American literary studies has disowned it introduction Great Expectations The Imaginative Literature of the Confederate States of America 2 Introduction outright. With a handful of notable exceptions, the literature of the South during the American Civil War is simply not on the “c19” map.2 One can imagine a number of reasons that Confederate literature has eluded both southern and nineteenth-century American literary studies. First and foremost, the assumption that critics like Wilson and Aaron make about the paucity of Confederate literature is a sensible one. The Confederacy lasted for four short years, during which time its littérateurs were perpetually beleaguered. Among the persistent and structural problems faced by Confederate writers and publishers were severe shortages of paper, ink, type, skilled labor, and printing presses—“in short, everything needed to produce a successful publishing industry” (Fahs 5).3 These material hardships were exacerbated by economic and logistical hardships, including rampant in- flation, a shoddy interstate mail system, and the omnipresence of Yankee troops on southern land. This is to say nothing of relatively low literacy rates in the new Confederate nation. In truth, many southerners remained dubious about the prospects of a southern literature before, during, and after the American Civil War.4 Faced with such challenges, the emergence of a literary culture in the Civil War South would have been no small wonder. And yet, as this book demonstrates , the Confederacy gave rise to a robust literary culture. The war had thrown the South for the first time “upon its own literary resources” (Hubbell , South 454); among other things, the federal blockade denied southern readers access to northern literature. This, in turn, provided southern, white elites with an opportunity to claim cultural autonomy from the North. As Michael T. Bernath argues persuasively in his recent intellectual history of Confederate cultural nationalists, their success in creating a “native literature ” was “startling, almost unbelievable,” particularly in light of the difficulties outlined above (152). Although this book largely avoids recursive debates about literary quality, one of its organizing principles is that the Confederacy produced a quantity of literature that warrants closer examination.5 Military defeat may provide another reason for the ongoing critical neglect of Confederate literature. The Confederate States of America failed, and failed spectacularly. Perhaps literary historians see little reason to study in depth an abortive literature. To be sure, the Confederate national moment was whirligig, and scholars have few models for thinking about the emergence and collapse of a nation over the course of a mere fifty-one months. Moreover , in light of the eventual failure of Confederate nationhood, it is all too easy to read Confederate literary nationalism either proleptically or palinodically . Knowing what we know about the...

Share