Download or read book Visions of Order in William Gilmore Simms written by Masahiro Nakamura and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of nineteenth-century America's foremost men of letters, William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) of Charleston, South Carolina, distinguished himself as a historian, poet, and novelist; yet his stalwart allegiance to the ideals of the Confederacy have kept him largely marginalized from the modern literary canon. In this engaging study, Masahiro Nakamura seeks to reinsert Simms in current American literary and cultural studies through a careful consideration of Simms's southern conservatism as a valuable literary counterpoint to the bourgeois individualist ideology of his northern contemporaries. For Nakamura, Simms's vision of social order runs contrary to the staunch individualism expressed in traditional American romances by authors such as James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In his thoughtful approaches to Simms's historical depictions of the making of American history and society, Nakamura finds consistent assertions of social order against the perils of literal and metaphoric wilderness, a conservative vision that he traces to the influence of Simms's southern genius loci. To understand how this southern conservatism also manifests itself in Simms's fiction, Nakamura contrasts Simms's historical romances with those of Hawthorne, as representative of the New England romance tradition, to differentiate the ways in which the two writers interpret the dynamic between the individual and society. Nakamura finds that Simms's protagonists struggle to establish their places within their culture while Hawthorne's characters are often at odds with their culture. The resulting comparison enriches our understanding of both writers.
Download or read book Reading William Gilmore Simms written by Todd Hagstette and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2017-08-10 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engaging approaches to the vast output of South Carolina's premier man of letters William Gilmore Simms was the best known and certainly the most accomplished writer of the mid-nineteenth-century South. His literary ascent began early, with his first book being published when he was nineteen years old and his reputation as a literary genius secured before he turned thirty. Over a career that spanned nearly forty-five years, he established himself as the American South's premier man of letters—an accomplished poet, novelist, short fiction writer, essayist, historian, dramatist, cultural journalist, biographer, and editor. In Reading William Gilmore Simms, Todd Hagstette has created an anthology of critical introductions to Simms's major publications, including those recently brought back into print by the University of South Carolina Press, offering the first ever primer compendium of the author's vast output. Simms was a Renaissance man of American letters, lauded in his time by both popular audiences and literary icons alike. Yet the author's extensive output, which includes nearly eighty published volumes, can be a barrier to his study. To create a gateway to reading and studying Simms, Hagstette has assembled thirty-eight essays by twenty-four scholars to review fifty-five Simms works. Addressing all the author's major works, the essays provide introductory information and scholarly analysis of the most crucial features of Simms's literary achievement. Arranged alphabetically by title for easy access, the book also features a topical index for more targeted inquiry into Simms's canon. Detailing the great variety and astonishing consistency of Simms's thought throughout his long career as well as examining his posthumous reconsideration, Reading William Gilmore Simms bridges the author's genius and readers' growing curiosity. The only work of its kind, this book provides an essential passport to the far-flung worlds of Simms's fecund imagination.
Download or read book Vasconselos written by William Gilmore Simms and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 2013-12-01 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The writings of William Gilmore Simms (1806–1870) provide a sweeping fictional portrait of the colonial and antebellum South in all of its regional diversity. Simms's account of the region is more comprehensive than that of any other author of his time; he treats the major intellectual and social issues of the South and depicts the bonds and tensions among all of its inhabitants. By the mid-1840s Simms's novels were so well known that Edgar Allan Poe could call him "the best novelist which this country has, on the whole, produced." Perhaps the darkest of Simms's novel-length works, Vasconselos (1853) presents a fictionalized account of one of the first European efforts to settle the land that would become the United States, the Hernando de Soto expedition of 1539. Set largely in Havana, Cuba, as the explorers prepare to embark, the work explores such themes as the marginalization of racial and national minorities, the historical abuse of women, and the tendency of absolute power to corrupt absolutely. In addition, Simms anticipates in this colonial romance the works of renowned scholars who would follow him, including the historian Frederick Jackson Turner and the entire formal scholarly field of psychology, which would take shape only long after the author's death.
Download or read book A Southern Writer and the Civil War written by Jeffery J. Rogers and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-02-18 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians of the American Civil War have debated a wide range of questions raised by the war and its outcome. None have been more vigorously argued as those surrounding its outcome. One of the leading explanations for Confederate defeat has been the argument that the Civil War South lacked a national identity. Related to and supporting this argument is the contention that the Civil War South failed to produce a distinct and vibrant literary culture. These contentions have been challenged by a growing body of literature which argues that the Civil War South did produce a sense of cultural and national identity. This book adds to this counter current through an examination of the Civil War experiences and writings of the Antebellum South's leading literary figure. Surprisingly, given William Gilmore Simms' well-known status prior to the war, his life and work during the course of the war itself has been understudied. This examination reveals the depth and extent to which Simms not only supported the Confederate war effort but how Simms conceptualized and articulated a vision of Confederate nationalism.
Download or read book Hemispheric Regionalism written by Gretchen J. Woertendyke and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-02 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this broad ranging study, Gretchen Woertendyke reconfigures US literary history as a product of hemispheric relations. Hemispheric Regionalism: Romance and the Geography of Genre, brings together a rich archive of popular culture, fugitive slave narratives, advertisements, political treatises, and literature to construct a new literary history from a hemispheric and regional perspective. At the center of this history is romance, a popular and versatile literary genre uniquely capable of translating the threat posed by the Haitian Revolution--or the expansionist possibilities of Cuban annexation--for a rapidly increasing readership. Through romance, she traces imaginary and real circuits of exchange and remaps romance's position in nineteenth century life and letters as irreducible to, nor fully mediated by, a concept of nation. The energies associated with Cuba and Haiti, manifest destiny and apocalypse, bring historical depth to an otherwise short national history. As a result, romance becomes remarkably influential in inculcating a sense of new world citizenry. The study shifts our critical focus from novel and nation, to romance and region, inevitable, she argues, when we attend to the tangled, messy relations across geographic and historical boundaries. Woertendyke reads the archives of Gabriel Prosser, Nat Turner, and Denmark Vesey along with less frequently treated writers such as John Howison, William Gilmore Simms, and J.H. Ingraham. The study provides a new context for understanding works by Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and James Fenimore Cooper and brings together the theories of Charles Brockden Brown, the editorial work of Maturin M. Ballou, and the historical romances of Walter Scott. In Hemispheric Regionalism, Woertendyke demonstrates that US literature has always been the product of hemispheric and regional relations and that all forms of romance are central to this history.
Download or read book Acts of Modernity written by David Buchanan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Acts of Modernity, David Buchanan reads nineteenth-century historical novels from Scotland, America, France, and Canada as instances of modern discourse reflective of community concerns and methods that were transatlantic in scope. Following on revolutionary events at home and abroad, the unique combination of history and romance initiated by Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) furthered interest in the transition to and depiction of the nation-state. Established and lesser-known novelists reinterpreted the genre to describe the impact of modernization and to propose coping mechanisms, according to interests and circumstances. Besides analysis of the chronotopic representation of modernity within and between national contexts, Buchanan considers how remediation enabled diverse communities to encounter popular historical novels in upmarket and downmarket forms over the course of the century. He pays attention to the way communication practices are embedded within and constitutive of the social lives of readers, and more specifically, to how cultural producers adapted the historical novel to dynamic communication situations. In these ways, Acts of Modernity investigates how the historical novel was repeatedly reinvented to effectively communicate the consequences of modernity as problem-solutions of relevance to people on both sides of the Atlantic.
Download or read book Red States written by Gina Caison and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2018-10-01 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Red States uses a regional focus in order to examine the tenets of white southern nativism and Indigenous resistance to colonialism in the U.S. South. Gina Caison argues that popular misconceptions of Native American identity in the U.S. South can be understood by tracing how non-Native audiences in the region came to imagine indigeneity through the presentation of specious histories presented in regional literary texts, and she examines how Indigenous people work against these narratives to maintain sovereign land claims in their home spaces through their own literary and cultural productions. As Caison demonstrates, these conversations in the U.S. South have consequences for how present-day conservative political discourses resonate across the United States. Assembling a newly constituted archive that includes regional theatrical and musical performances, pre-Civil War literatures, and contemporary novels, Caison illuminates the U.S. South's continued investment in settler colonialism and the continued Indigenous resistance to this paradigm. Ultimately, she concludes that the region is indeed made up of red states, but perhaps not in the way readers initially imagine.
Download or read book Hans Christian Andersen in American Literary Criticism of the Nineteenth Century written by Herbert Rowland and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Hans Christian Andersen in American Literary Criticism of the Nineteenth Century, Herbert Rowland argues that the literary criticism accompanying the publication of Hans Christian Andersen’s works in the United States compares favorably in scope, perceptiveness, and chronological coverage with the few other national receptions of Andersen outside of Denmark. Rowland contends that American commentators made it abundantly evident that, in addition to his fairy tales, Andersen wrote several novels, travelogues, and an autobiography which were all of more than common interest. In the process, Rowland shows that American commentators “naturalized” Andersen in the United States by confronting the sensationalism in the journalism and literature of the time with the perceived wholesomeness of Andersen’s writing, deploying his long fiction on both sides of the debate over the nature and relative value of the romance and the novel, and drawing on three of his works to support their positions on slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.
Download or read book Against War and Empire written by Richard Whatmore and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-31 with total page 683 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whatmore presents an intellectual history of republicans who strove to ensure Geneva's survival as an independent state. Whatmore shows how the Genevan republicans grappled with the ideas of Rousseau, Coltaire, Bentham and others in seeking to make Europe safe for small states, by vanquishing the threats presented by war and by empire.
Download or read book Faulkner and History written by Jay Watson and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2017-03-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Faulkner remains a historian's writer. A distinguished roster of historians have referenced Faulkner in their published work. They are drawn to him as a fellow historian, a shaper of narrative reflections on the meaning of the past; as a historiographer, a theorist, and dramatist of the fraught enterprise of doing history; and as a historical figure himself, especially following his mid-century emergence as a public intellectual after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. This volume brings together historians and literary scholars to explore the many facets of Faulkner's relationship to history: the historical contexts of his novels and stories; his explorations of the historiographic imagination; his engagement with historical figures from both the regional and national past; his influence on professional historians; his pursuit of alternate modes of temporal awareness; and the histories of print culture that shaped the production, reception, and criticism of Faulkner's work. Contributors draw on the history of development in the Mississippi Valley, the construction of Confederate memory, the history and curriculum of Harvard University, twentieth-century debates over police brutality and temperance reform, the history of modern childhood, and the literary histories of anti-slavery writing and pulp fiction to illuminate Faulkner's work. Others in the collection explore the meaning of Faulkner's fiction for such professional historians as C. Vann Woodward and Albert Bushnell Hart. In these ways and more, Faulkner and History offers fresh insights into one of the most persistent and long-recognized elements of the Mississippian's artistic vision.
Download or read book William Gilmore Simms s Selected Reviews on Literature and Civilization written by William Gilmore Simms and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2014-02-07 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During William Gilmore Simms's life (1806-1870), book reviews and critical essays became vital parts of American literary culture and intellectual discourse. Simms was an assiduous reviewer and essayist, proving by example the importance of those genres. William Gilmore Simms's Selected Reviews on Literature and Civilization publishes for the first time in book form sixty-two examples of the writer's hundreds of newspaper and periodical reviews and book notes as well as four important critical essays. Together, the reviews and essays reveal the regional, national, and international dimensions of Simms's intellectual interests. To frame the two distinct parts of Selected Reviews, James Everett Kibler, Jr., and David Moltke-Hansen have written a general introduction that considers the development of book reviewing and the authorship of essays in cultural and historical contexts. In part one, Kibler offers an introduction that examines Simms's reviewing habits and the aesthetic and critical values that informed the author's reviews. Kibler then publishes selected texts of reviews and provides historical and cultural backgrounds for each selection. Simms was an early proponent of the critical theories of Romantics such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edgar Allan Poe. Widely read in European history and literature, he reviewed works published in French, German, and classics in original Greek and Latin and in translation. Simms also was an early, ardent advocate of works of local color and of southern "backwoods" humorists of his day. Simms published notices of seven of Herman Melville's novels, the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and favorably reviewed Henry David Thoreau's Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Simms published numerous review essays of twenty thousand or more words in literary journals and also republished two collections in book form. These volumes treated such subjects as Americanism in literature and the American Revolution in South Carolina. Yet, as part two of Selected Reviews demonstrates, Simms ranged much more widely in the intellectual milieu. Such cultural and political topics as the 1848 revolution in France, the history of the literary essay, the roles of women in the American Revolution, and the activities of the southern convention in Nashville in 1850 captured Simms's attention. Moltke-Hansen's introduction to part two examines Simms's roles in, and responses to, the Romantic critical revolution and the other revolutions then roiling Europe and America.
Download or read book A Disturbing and Alien Memory written by Douglas L. Mitchell and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2008-12 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late nineteenth century, as the study of history shifted from the domain of letters into the social sciences, novelists in the North and the West generally turned away from writing history. Many southern novelists and poets, however, continued to undertake historical writing as an extension of their art form. What made southern literary figures differ from their northern and western counterparts? In A Disturbing and Alien Memory, Douglas L. Mitchell addresses this intriguing question by tracing a line of southern writers from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, finding that an obsessive need to defend the South and the oft-noted "rage to explain" drove some creative writers to continue to make forays into history and biography in an effort to enter a more public sphere where they could more decisively influence interpretations of the past. In the Romantic history of the nineteenth century, Mitchell explains, men of letters saw themselves as keepers of memory whose renderings of the past could help shape the future of the nation. He explores the historical writing of William Gilmore Simms to trace the failure of Romantic nationalism in the growing split between North and South, then turns to Thomas Nelson Page's effort to resurrect the South as a "spiritual nation" with a redeemed history after the Civil War. Mitchell juxtaposes their work with that of William Wells Brown, the pioneering African American historian and novelist who used the authority of history to write blacks into the American story. Moving into the twentieth century, Mitchell analyzes the historical component of the Southern Agrarian project, focusing on the tension between modernist aesthetics and polemical aims in Allen Tate's Civil War biographies. He then traces a path toward a viable historical vision, Robert Penn Warren's recovery of a tragic understanding, and the creation of a compelling historical art in the work of Shelby Foote. Throughout, Mitchell examines the peculiar dilemma of southern writers, the changing nature of history and its relation to the realm of letters, and the question of public authority, shedding light on several neglected texts in the process -- including Simms's The Sack and Destruction of Columbia, S.C., Brown's The Negro in the American Rebellion, Tate's Jefferson Davis, and Warren's John Brown. Offering a new perspective on a perennial debate in southern letters, A Disturbing and Alien Memory provides a critical framework for a neglected genre in the southern literary canon.
Download or read book The Partisan written by William Gilmore Simms and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thirteenth volume in the ongoing Arkansas Edition of the works of Simms, The Partisan is the first in order of publication of Simms's Revolutionary War romances.
Download or read book Southern Passages and Pictures written by William Gilmore Simms and published by . This book was released on 1839 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Bible in American Poetic Culture written by Shira Wolosky and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Simms Reader written by William Gilmore Simms and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long considered a leading literary figure of the Old South, William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) wrote letters, novels, short fiction, drama, essays, and poetry in his prolific career. Born in Charleston to an old South Carolina family of modest means and raised by a grandmother with whom his father left him after his mother's death, Simms felt a simultaneous sense of loyalty to and alienation from his native region. He was a major intellectual figure on the East Coast before the Civil War but saw his New York publishers abandon him after secession, of which he was a vocal supporter. Simms's novels and poetry have been published in modern editions, and he has been the subject of numerous biographies and critical studies, but until now there has been no collection covering the broad spectrum of his writings. The Simms Reader presents a selection of his nonnovelistic work--letters, short fiction, essays, historical writings, poetry, and epigrams--chosen and introduced by the preeminent Simms scholar John Caldwell Guilds.
Download or read book The Vision of Cortes Cain and Other Poems written by William Gilmore Simms and published by . This book was released on 1829 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
