Not Even Past : The Stories We Keep Telling about the Civil War

Marrs, Cody

Johns Hopkins University Press（2020/05発売）

Johns Hopkins University Press（2020/05発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 240 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781421436654
• DDC分類 813.4093581

Full Description

How the Civil War endures in American life through literature and culture.

Recipient of the Eric Hoffer Award's Montaigne Medal

The American Civil War lives on in our collective imagination like few other events. The story of the war has been retold in countless films, novels, poems, memoirs, plays, sculptures, and monuments. Often remembered as an emancipatory struggle, as an attempt to destroy slavery in America now and forever, it is also memorialized as a fight for Southern independence; as a fratricide that divided the national family; and as a dark, cruel conflict defined by its brutality. What do these stories, myths, and rumors have in common, and what do they teach us about modern America?

In this fascinating book, Cody Marrs reveals how these narratives evolved over time and why they acquired such lasting power. Marrs addresses an eclectic range of texts, traditions, and creators, from Walt Whitman, Abram Ryan, and Abraham Lincoln to Margaret Mitchell, D. W. Griffith, and W. E. B. Du Bois. He also identifies several basic plots about the Civil War that anchor public memory and continually compete for cultural primacy. In other words, from the perspective of American cultural memory, there is no single Civil War.

Whether they fill us with elation or terror; whether they side with the North or the South; whether they come from the 1860s, the 1960s, or today, these stories all make one thing vividly clear: the Civil War is an ongoing conflict, persisting not merely as a cultural touchstone but as an unresolved struggle through which Americans inevitably define themselves. A timely, evocative, and beautifully written book, Not Even Past is essential reading for anyone interested in the Civil War and its role in American history.

Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1. A Family Squabble
Chapter 2. A Dark and Cruel War
Chapter 3. The Lost Cause
Chapter 4. The Great Emancipation
Afterword. Recent and Future Civil Wars
Acknowledgments
Notes
Suggested Further Reading
Index