Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction
- The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I The Blind Ruck of Event
- Part II Worlds Made and Remade
- 11 The Literature of Reconstruction and the Worlds the Civil War Might Have Made
- 12 Frederick Douglass, Andrew Johnson, and the Work of Reconstruction
- 13 African Americans, Africa, and the Long Watch Night for Freedom
- 14 Literature and the Material Cultures of Confederate Remembrance
- 15 Elmira and the Post-War Geographies of Black Monumentalizing
- 16 Charles Chesnutt and the Reconstruction of Black Education
- 17 Charles Chesnutt, The Colonel’s Dream, and The Futures of Cotton
- 18 Brown v. Board, the Civil War Centennial, and the Literature of Civil Rights
- 19 The Future of Civil War and Reconstruction Literature
- 20 Reenactment as Resistance
- Suggestions for Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to …
14 - Literature and the Material Cultures of Confederate Remembrance
from Part II - Worlds Made and Remade
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2022
- The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction
- The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I The Blind Ruck of Event
- Part II Worlds Made and Remade
- 11 The Literature of Reconstruction and the Worlds the Civil War Might Have Made
- 12 Frederick Douglass, Andrew Johnson, and the Work of Reconstruction
- 13 African Americans, Africa, and the Long Watch Night for Freedom
- 14 Literature and the Material Cultures of Confederate Remembrance
- 15 Elmira and the Post-War Geographies of Black Monumentalizing
- 16 Charles Chesnutt and the Reconstruction of Black Education
- 17 Charles Chesnutt, The Colonel’s Dream, and The Futures of Cotton
- 18 Brown v. Board, the Civil War Centennial, and the Literature of Civil Rights
- 19 The Future of Civil War and Reconstruction Literature
- 20 Reenactment as Resistance
- Suggestions for Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to …
Summary
This chapter examines the literary afterlives of white Confederates' household possessions, especially those damaged during military invasion, or degraded by the impoverishment experienced by elite white southerners in the Civil War’s aftermath. It argues that, alongside emancipation's arrival, the military incursion into southern plantations and wealthy households altered the premises of white possession beyond recall. The damaged objects left behind became more than just traces of enemy invasion to the privileged slaveholding women left to pick up the pieces. As these women revealed in their private journals, their own belongings represented a threat to the forms of selfhood and racial pedigree that had defined their antebellum lives. In exploring how ex-Confederate women, writing during Reconstruction, used fiction to reorganize and display their sullied possessions, this chapter outlines a material history integral to the myth of Confederate exceptionalism—a myth more recognizably reified by monuments to the Lost Cause.
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- The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction , pp. 213 - 228Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022