Teaching the Literatures of the American Civil War
- Editor: Colleen Glenney Boggs
- Pages: xi & 317 pp.
- Published: 2016
- ISBN: 9781603292764 (Paperback)
- ISBN: 9781603292757 (Hardcover)
“Boggs’s collection has easily earned a place within pedagogical and scholarly realms. . . . [A] superb collection that should become part of any university or personal library.”
—The Journal of Southern History
When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1863, he reportedly greeted her as “the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War.” To this day, Uncle Tom’s Cabin serves as a touchstone for the war. Yet few works have been selected to represent the Civil War’s literature, even though historians have filled libraries with books on the war itself.
This volume helps teachers address the following questions: What is the relation of canonical works to the multitude of occasional texts that were penned in response to the Civil War, and how can students understand them together? Should an approach to war literature reflect the chronology of historical events or focus instead on thematic clusters, generic forms, and theoretical concerns? How do we introduce students to archival materials that sometimes support, at other times resist, the close reading practices in which they have been trained?
Twenty-three essays cover such topics as visiting historical sites to teach the literature, using digital materials, teaching with anthologies; soldiers’ dime novels, Confederate women’s diaries, songs, speeches; the conflicted theme of treason, and the double-edged theme of brotherhood; how battlefield photographs synthesize fact and fiction; and the roles in the war played by women, by slaves, and by African American troops. A section of the volume provides a wealth of resources for teachers.
This volume is available for free in these e-book formats:
- MOBI format (Kindle)
- EPUB format (Nook, iPad, Sony Reader, Adobe Digital Editions, and other compatible devices and software)
Faith Barrett
Alex W. Black
Allison E. Carey
Tess Chakkalakal
Matthew R. Davis
Jessica DeSpain
Kathleen Diffley
Elizabeth Duquette
Rebecca Entel
Ian Finseth
Christopher Hager
Coleman Hutchison
Shawn Jones
Wiebke Omnus Klumpenhower
Dana McMichael
Larry J. Reynolds
Jess Roberts
Susan M. Ryan
Catherine E. Saunders
William Steele
Julia Stern
Melissa J. Strong
Timothy Sweet
Darren T. Williamson
Michael Ziser
Acknowledgments (xi)
Introduction (1)
Part I: Teaching Civil War Literature in Historical Context
Contradictions and Ambivalence: Emerson, Hawthorne, and the Antebellum Origins of Civil War Literature (23)
Complicating the Relation between Literature and History: Slave Participation in Fact and Fiction (33)
Truth and Consequences: Helping Students Contextualize the Literary Aftermath of the American Civil War (43)
Teaching Civil War Literature to International Students: A Case Study from South Korea (53)
Team-Teaching the Civil War at Historical Sites (58)
Part II: Teaching Various Genres
Constituting Communities: Reading the Civil War in Poetry and Song (71)
Reading on the (Home) Front: Teaching Soldiers’ Dime Novels (81)
Letters, Memoranda, and Official Documents: Teaching Nonfiction Prose (91)
Approaches to Life Writing: Confederate Women’s Diaries and the Construction of Ethnic Identity (101)
Teaching Civil War Speech; or, Abraham Lincoln’s Texts in Context (111)
Part III: Teaching Specific Topics
The Civil War and Literary Realism (123)
Civil War Landscapes (135)
Brotherhood in Civil War–Era America (145)
Poetic Representations of African American Soldiers (156)
Women’s Roles in Antislavery and Civil War Literature (165)
“Treasonable Sympathies”: Affect and Allegiance in the Civil War (174)
Part IV: Teaching Materials
Teaching through Primary Source Documents (187)
Teaching with Images: Synthesizing the Civil War in Fact and Fiction (198)
Recollecting the Civil War through Nineteenth-Century Periodicals (211)
Teaching with Contemporary Anthologies (221)
Teaching with Historical Anthologies (233)
Using Digital Archives (243)
Civil War Literature and First-Year Writing Instruction (255)
Part V: Resources
Reference Guides (267)
General Studies (267)
Anthologies, Readers, and Document Collections (268)
Visual Materials (270)
Recommended Print Editions (272)
Additional Resources for Specific Authors and Texts (273)
Autobiographies and Diaries (275)
Dime Novels (278)
Special Topics (279)
Notes on Contributors (285)
Works Cited (289)
Index (311)
“[This] book stands as an implicit refutation of Whitman’s famous claim that ‘the real wars will never get into the books’ and of Daniel Aaron’s more recent description of ‘the unwritten war.’ More important, it provides numerous points of access for instructors of this growing field.”
—Randall Fuller, University of Tulsa
