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1 results

  • 5 - The Confederacy and Other Southern Fictions

  • from Part I - The Blind Ruck of Event
  • Edited by Kathleen Diffley, University of Iowa, Coleman Hutchison, University of Texas, Austin
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction
    Published online:
    04 August 2022
    Print publication:
    18 August 2022, pp 73-87

  • Summary

    The Confederate nation was always an exercise in imagination. Southern nationalists, including Confederates and antebellum authors, viewed literature as integral to the project of nation-building. Just as the Confederacy would build its own world around the socio-economic system that defined the region—slavery—early southern nationalist and later Confederate novels speculated about a separate reality that fed into proslavery southerners’ understandings of themselves and their culture. This chapter explores the role of southern nationalist fiction in creating and sustaining an idea of the Confederacy from the antebellum period through the Civil War, using the example of novels and short fiction by authors such as Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, Augusta Jane Evans, and Richard Malcolm Johnston.