Recent scholarship in the history of emotions encourages us to think about the ways war-time Americans managed their feelings. Separation of families fostered loneliness, for example, the tedium of camp life brought on boredom, the delays of news from home or from camp occasioned anxiety, and the uncertainty of the war’s outcome eroded confidence. Reading, this chapter argues, became a deliberate strategy to mitigate these corrosive effects of warfare. By looking at Civil War–era reading practices we can see how readers engaged imaginative literature and other genres popular in the mid-nineteenth century to maintain the ties that bind. Epistolary conversations about books allowed those separated by war to approximate shared reading, a common practice in antebellum America. And they allowed readers to express emotions by proxy, using fictional characters and imagined scenarios to voice their thoughts and invite reassurance. Fundamentally, reading reminded readers they were not alone.

From the heightened civil strife of the late antebellum years through the Reconstruction era, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass underwent significant expansions and redactions across numerous editions. Historically informed literary criticism has become highly attuned to the political connections and implications of even minor formal adjustments to Whitman’s masterwork. Yet through all Whitman’s alterations, Leaves of Grass maintained a prophetic vision of an American nation reconstructed around a more egalitarian core than the current political system supported. This chapter shows how each of the revised 1860, 1867, and 1872 editions of Leaves consistently presented itself as a central component of the more democratic version of the United States that Whitman sought to articulate and enact. As the postbellum challenges of federal Reconstruction became central to national politics, Whitman attempted to leverage the venerable reconstructive impulse behind Leaves of Grass, which gained a more concrete relevance as he adopted his postbellum persona of the Good Gray Poet.

Restoring health to casualties of the Civil War functioned as a work of unprecedented national literary repair. Soldiers, caregivers, and civilians experienced wounding, illness, and convalescence as conditions that not only imperiled the physical body, but also symbolically disrupted the national body and psyche. Such disruptions were as visible in Whitman's poetic sites of caregiving communion as they were in the turbulence of Chesnutt's or Tourgée's Reconstruction stories, where Black heritage functioned alternately as contagion or reclamation. In fiction, poetry, and memoir, period writers explored the intimacies of caregiving, raising bedside and battlefield encounters to a trope whose racial and gendered valences limned the tragedies and absurdities of war-time loss. Describing a range of traumas from physical pain to the compromises of disability, they oversaw the emergence of the hospital narrative as a budding literary genre that, in coming to terms with the medical crisis of the war and its aftermath, established the genre that we prize today.

Drawing on her border-state experiences, Rebecca Harding Davis explored the meaning of the Civil War and its complicated legacy throughout her career. Her insistence on realism in her writing about the conflict as it unfolded prefigured her later skepticism about the emerging memory of the war as a Lost Cause. Her early Atlantic Monthly stories, such as “John Lamar” and “David Gaunt,” frame political justifications for a war of competing rights and anticipate her use of the trial metaphor to suggest justice deferred at the end of Waiting for the Verdict. Her postbellum work, such as “The Rose of Carolina” and “How the Widow Crossed the Lines,” acknowledges the force of cultural memory, itself an adversarial contest of competing claims in late nineteenth-century America. Davis invites her readers to revisit the lessons of the war, its cultural legacy, and its impact on a verdict too long deferred.

Watch Night began when enslaved and free African Americans kept vigil, to sing and pray, on December 31, 1862, as they awaited news in the morning of the Emancipation Proclamation. Their optimism gave way to the nominal freedoms and rights of citizenship that African American families and communities experienced in the wake of emancipation and during Reconstruction. African American writers of these decades introduce descriptions of African landscapes, customs, values, and histories as metaphors for the uncertain status and tentative futures their people confronted after the Civil War and during Reconstruction. They associate the African continent with a variety of meanings: the brutal history of slavery; the erasure or dismissal of influential cultures and intellects; a persistent legacy of resistance to oppression and rebellion against bondage; the fugitive status of African Americans in their own country and as exiles abroad; and the precarity of racial progress even as Black schools, churches, and other self-sufficient institutions are established by formerly enslaved Black southern communities.

Traditionally, white radical Republicans like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens have been given the main credit for the work of Reconstruction that culminated with the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments. This chapter shifts the focus to consider the work of Frederick Douglass and other Black activists in contesting the racist president Andrew Johnson and applying pressure to the Republicans to bring about the full citizenship and enfranchisement of African Americans. Douglass had a dramatic 1866 meeting with Andrew Johnson in the White House, and he continued to apply pressure to Johnson and the Republicans over the next several years. The chapter considers some of Douglass’s most important Reconstruction writings, including his essays in the Atlantic Monthly, his great 1867 lecture “Sources of Danger to the Republic,” and the 1881 version of his Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.

The violent disunion rhetorics that swelled in anticipation of Civil War crafted sectional identities for listeners, pitting the interests of opposing sides as irreconcilable. For some, embracing such sectional identities was a rhetorical process. The war-time diary of one Virginia plantation mistress, Ida Powell Dulany, serves as a case study to explore the process of sectional identification and to illustrate the role of proximity to war’s violence in ethos formation. The Dulany plantation, Oakley, sat on a major thoroughfare that both northern and southern troops sought to control, bringing war’s violence to its inhabitants. Oakley represents a site of competing and divergent rhetorical motives and a site of conflict over the meaning of the southern home. The concept of rhetorical becoming accounts for the circumstances, contexts, and locations that shape self-perception and rhetorical action, foregrounding the interplay of public discourses such as disunion rhetorics and individual experiences in shaping a sense of war-time ethos.

On Aquinas’s view, a human being is a material object, a hylomorphic compound of prime matter and the substantial form of a human being. That form is capable of existing on its own, apart from matter; and it does so in the period between the death of a human being and the resurrection of his body, when that form configures matter again. The resurrection of the body is not a reassembly of bodily bits that had previously composed the body; it is more nearly a reconstitution of the substantial form with prime matter. Finally, after death some human beings go to heaven. In heaven, a human being is perfected, so that the true nature of a human being is revealed best in the condition of human beings in heaven. A human being in heaven sees God and is united in loving relationship with God and with all others who are also united to God. In this vision and union, she has the full perfection of her human nature and also her complete beatitude.

We recognize one of a pair of opposites by means of the other, Aquinas says. Just as we understand what darkness is only by reference to the notion of light, we must understand what evil is by reference to the notion of good. What is good is what is desirable. Every nature desires its own being and perfection, so we can conclude that “the being and perfection of every nature has the character of goodness.”1 Evil, then, cannot be a being or nature; it must be an absence of good. Not every absence of good counts as evil, however. A stone lacks the power to see, but its “blindness” is not evil: The nature of a stone has no aptitude for sight, and so it is no part of the perfection of a stone that it should see. Thus, evil is not a simple negation of good, but a privation of good; and we recognize a privation by comparing it with the fullness of being that is characteristic of a thing’s nature.2 Evil is a defectus: a falling short of, or falling away from, what is good.

This chapter focuses on some of the principal ways in which the family has been viewed, or theorized, in political-economic thought, but focuses in particular on the legacy of Edmund Burke’s conservative defense of that institution against radical challenge on the grounds that inheritance materially underpins moral and cultural continuity. Tracing the the complex evolution of this essentially elitist argument in relation to Malthusianism, as well as through both the discourse of eugenics and literary responses to the emergence of a “mass society,” the chapter also highlights the role of Burkean traditions in affirming an orthodox heteronormativity against sexual liberationist movements, theorists, and writers. Ultimately, though, the conclusion demonstrates that the commodification of queer sexuality has contributed to new forms of sociocultural tension at the heart of our contemporary politics.

This Introduction provides an overview of the key ways in which literature and economics intersect. It firstly considers how literary texts encode economic knowledge in metaphorical – and more broadly tropic – uses of economic vocabulary, and via styles and forms that stand in a “homological” relation to monetary and financial systems. It then explains how critics have understood the ongoing overlaps between literature and economics as “genres” of writing, which have continued to borrow conventions from one another, even as the discipline of economics has become increasingly technical and mathematical. The Introduction next addresses the ways in which literary texts register the economic pressures to which they are most directly exposed: namely, the pressures of literary consumption and the literary marketplace. It closes by showing how social scientists are increasingly turning to literature and literary studies for economic insights, and by highlighting the emergence of the Economic Humanities as an interdisciplinary research field to which the approaches covered in this Cambridge Companion have made defining contributions.