| Description |
1 online resource (328 pages) |
| Contents |
Introduction: the rhetoric of voice in Civil War poetry -- Shaping communities through popular song -- "We are here at our country's call": nationalist commitments and personal stances in Union and Confederate soldiers' poems -- The lyric I and the poetics of protest: Julia Ward Howe and Frances Harper -- Addresses to a divided nation: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and the place of the lyric I -- Romantic visions and Southern stances: Henry Timrod, Sarah Piatt, and George Moses Horton -- "They answered him aloud": popular voice and nationalist allegiances in Herman Melville's battle-pieces -- Epilogue: Civil War poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries |
| Summary |
"Focusing on literary and popular poets, as well as work by women, African Americans, and soldiers, this book considers how writers used poetry to articulate their relationships to family, community, and nation during the Civil War. Faith Barrett suggests that the nationalist "we" and the personal "I" are not opposed in this era; rather they are related positions on a continuous spectrum of potential stances. For example, while Julia Ward Howe became famous for her "Battle Hymn of the Republic," in an earlier poem titled "The Lyric I" she struggles to negotiate her relationship to domestic, aesthetic, and political stances. Barrett makes the case that Americans on both sides of the struggle believed that poetry had an important role to play in defining national identity. She considers how poets created a platform from which they could speak both to their own families and local communities and to the nations of the Confederacy, the Union, and the United States. She argues that the Civil War changed the way American poets addressed their audiences and that Civil War poetry changed the way Americans understood their relationship to the nation."--Project Muse |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
English |
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Print version record |
| Subject |
Patriotic poetry, American -- History and criticism
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War poetry, American -- History and criticism
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American poetry -- 19th century -- History and criticism
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SOCIAL SCIENCE -- General.
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American poetry
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Patriotic poetry, American
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War and literature
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War poetry, American
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| SUBJECT |
United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Literature and the war.
http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85140245
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| Subject |
United States
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| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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History
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| LC no. |
2012030820 |
| ISBN |
9781613762141 |
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1613762143 |
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