During the Civil War and Reconstruction, popular magazines throughout the country published hundreds of short narratives that confronted or evaded the meaning of the Union's great crisis. Yet despite their importance as a measure of the era's...
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During the Civil War and Reconstruction, popular magazines throughout the country published hundreds of short narratives that confronted or evaded the meaning of the Union's great crisis. Yet despite their importance as a measure of the era's cultural temper, these stories have remain largely unexamined in studies of Civil War literature. Where My Heart is Turning Ever is the first volume in a projected trilogy that seeks to recover the significance of this forgotten body of writing. Unearthing more than three hundred stories from sixteen magazines in the South and West as well as the culturally dominant Northeast, Kathleen Diffley examines the effort of popular writers and publications to contain the disruption caused by the war and its aftermath. That effort, she shows, proved especially precarious when writers took up matters of race, political section, and gender
Preface: Popular Narratives and Civil Crisis -- Introduction -- Domestic Narrative and National Stability : Mark Twain, "A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It" ; "One o'de ole Blue Hen's Chickens" -- The Romance of Union as National Metaphor : John W. De Forest, "Parole d'Honneur" ; "A Woman's Only Revenge" -- The Adventure of National Initiation : Rebecca Harding Davis, "How the Widow Crossed the Lines" ; "Thunder on the Plank Road" -- Coda: From Uncle Tom to Uncle Remus and Beyond
