{"product_id":"9781621900139","title":"Southern Women Novelists and the Civil War: Trauma and Collective Memory in the American Literary Tradition since 1861","description":"\u003cbr\u003eDuring and after the Civil War, southern women played a critical role in shaping the South’s\u003cbr\u003e evolving collective memory by penning journals and diaries, historical accounts, memoirs,\u003cbr\u003e and literary interpretations of the war. While a few of these writings—most notably Mary\u003cbr\u003e Chesnut’s diaries and Margaret Mitchell’s novel, \u003ci\u003eGone with the Wind\u003c\/i\u003e—have been studied in\u003cbr\u003e depth by numerous scholars, until now there has been no comprehensive examination of\u003cbr\u003e Civil War novels by southern women. In this welcome study, Sharon Talley explores works\u003cbr\u003e by fifteen such writers, illuminating the role that southern women played in fashioning\u003cbr\u003e cultural identity in the region.\u003cp\u003eBeginning with Augusta Jane Evans’s Macaria and Sallie Rochester Ford’s \u003ci\u003eRaids and\u003cbr\u003e Romance of Morgan and His Men\u003c\/i\u003e, which were published as the war still raged, Talley offers\u003cbr\u003e a chronological consideration of the novels with informative introductions for each time\u003cbr\u003e period. She examines Reconstruction works by Marion Harland, Mary Ann Cruse, and\u003cbr\u003e Rebecca Harding Davis, novels of the “Redeemed” South and the turn of the century by\u003cbr\u003e Mary Noailles Murfree, Ellen Glasgow, and Mary Johnston, and narratives by Evelyn Scott,\u003cbr\u003e Margaret Mitchell, and Caroline Gordon from the Modern period that spanned the two\u003cbr\u003e World Wars. Analysis of Margaret Walker’s \u003ci\u003eJubilee\u003c\/i\u003e (1966), the first critically acclaimed Civil\u003cbr\u003e War novel by an African American woman of the South, as well as other post–World War\u003cbr\u003e II works by Kaye Gibbons, Josephine Humphreys, and Alice Randall, offers a fitting conclusion\u003cbr\u003e to Talley’s study by addressing the inaccuracies in the romantic myth of the Old South\u003cbr\u003e that \u003ci\u003eGone with the Wind\u003c\/i\u003e most famously engraved on the nation’s consciousness.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eInformed by feminist, poststructural, and cultural studies theory, Talley’s close readings\u003cbr\u003e of these various novels ultimately refute the notion of a monolithic interpretation of\u003cbr\u003e the Civil War, presenting instead unique and diverse approaches to balancing “fact” and\u003cbr\u003e “fiction” in the long period of artistic production concerning this singular traumatic event\u003cbr\u003e in American history.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSharon Talley, professor of English at Texas A\u0026amp;M University–Corpus Christi, is the author\u003cbr\u003e of \u003ci\u003eAmbrose Bierce and the Dance of Death \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eStudent Companion to Herman Melville\u003c\/i\u003e. Her\u003cbr\u003e articles have appeared in \u003ci\u003eAmerican Imago, Journal of Men’s Studies, \u003c\/i\u003eand\u003ci\u003e Nineteenth-Century\u003cbr\u003e Prose.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Tennessee Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47056847667440,"sku":"9781621900139","price":74.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781621900139_p0.jpg?v=1763858736","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781621900139","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}