Remembering Civil War
Remembering Civil War
This chapter describes how the most significant Civil War writing was retrospective. The literary surge of Civil War remembering began, it seems, with the drying of the ink on General Robert E. Lee's April 9, 1865 surrender. This prodigious production continued to the end of the decade and beyond. Indeed, the need for imaginative recollection of this momentous event was intensified by historical distance, so that a writer in 1998 could describe the Civil War as still “unfinished.” In this sense, the chief cultural effect of the Civil War was to keep Americans permanently fixed in the four years of traumatic conflict. The array of novels and memoirs published in the decades after the war by such varied and prominent authors as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Ellen Glasgow, Frances Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Henry James, and Ulysses S. Grant lend support to this view.
Keywords: Civil War writing, Stuart Phelps, Ellen Glasgow, Frances Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Henry James, Ulysses S. Grant
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