Reconstruction, Reunion, and Representation in American Literary Histories (original) (raw)

2018, Reviews in American History

How are the Civil War and Reconstruction represented, and for what purposes? These are central questions that two recent texts ask and answer by revisiting and even combing through the ways these events are represented in literature. Additionally, Timothy Sweet and Brook Thomas expand our ideas of what literary cultures and Reconstruction literature are by incorporating epistolary, visual, and even musical print and oral culture. Literary Cultures of the Civil War (2016), edited by Timothy Sweet, uses the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War, when, Sweet argues, "literary historian Fred Lewis Pattee proclaimed a new definition of American literature," as a beginning framework to return to the "first really national period" that originated after the close of the war (p. 2; p. 1). Sweet revisits Pattee to discuss American writers' declaration of literary independence from European tradition and the absence of discussions of literature of that period in more contemporary critical analysis (p. 1). Additionally, Sweet points out omissions of African American writers. Thus, Sweet's collection claims to "[return] to the unsettled moment when the memory of the war was not yet overwritten by topoi that would later come to dominate, such as the Lost Cause, the romance of reunion, and the reconciliation of veterans" (p. 2). The collection delivers on this promise, using studies of oral culture, manuscript journals and letters, newspapers, magazines, and books produced before the end of Reconstruction to explore what Sweet calls "the ground of alternative memories" from the beginning of canon formation through the sesquicentennial (p. 2).