Missing in Action: Confederate Females in Civil War Novels

1991 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-26
Author(s):  
Elizabeth C. Clark
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
War Novels ◽  
Missing In Action

The Image of the Negro in the Pre-Civil-War Novels of John Pendleton Kennedy and William Gilmore Simms

1971 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-226
Author(s):  
Alan Henry Rose
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Garden City ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Crucial Issue ◽  
William Gilmore Simms ◽  
War Novels ◽  
Social Tensions ◽  
John Pendleton Kennedy

The crucial issue facing the novelists of the pre-Civil War South was the expression of the Negro in their writings. A fine balance had to be struck between the deliberate attempt to present, as William Taylor suggests in Cavalier and Yankee (Garden City, New York, 1961), a favourable image of the slave-holding society, and the subjective impulse to express the powerful forces of racial destruction that were covert in the ante-bellum South. Such a balance rarely occurred. Rather, as social tensions increased with the approach of the Civil War, the writers retreated from their confrontation with the image of the Negro. Kenneth Lynn, in Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Boston, 1959), shows a progression which finds the authors using increasingly younger narrators, which Lynn feels absolves them of the responsibility of maturely facing the issues. But the novels of John Pendleton Kennedy and William Gilmore Simms reveal rather different forms of evasion. Kennedy, the more didactic writer, as the war approached, increasingly removed his novels from the present. This simply relieved him of the obligation of expressing concretely documented reality, and allowed a shift into fantasy. The image of the Negro could be safely excluded from such a context. However, fantasy is, if anything, a more congenial environment for the expression of covert social forces. Thus, a curious irony occurs in Kennedy's later novels. The image of the Negro disappears from works such as Rob of the Bowl (1838), but the forces of demonic malevolence with which he is associated are transferred to the figure which replaces him, the indentured Indian. A racial equation emerges, and in this chiaroscuric world of night and fire the Indian offers a glimpse of the malevolence suppressed in the image of the Negro.

scholarly journals Child Journalists, the Civil War, and the Intersectional Work of Reporting Grief

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Danger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Missing In Action ◽  
Personal Trauma ◽  
Class Youth

In 1864, editors of two nationally-circulating periodicals, Nellie Williams (aged 14) and her sisters, Allie and Mary (aged 12 and  17), reported that their only brother and Union Soldier, Leroy K. Williams, was missing in action.  Filtering personal trauma through the performative discourses of nineteenth-century journalism, these young writers publicised their anguish over their brother’s capture. The culturally-situated intersectional identities reflected in and contested by their reporting—as white Northerners, working-class youth, loyal sisters, and enterprising journalists—expose a kaleidoscope of fissures and collisions between private and public, silence and enunciation, gender and class, trauma and resilience. The resulting tensions illustrate the ways by which genres shaped, and were shaped by, children’s articulations of suffering for a national audience during wartime.

Narrative Perspective in the Post-Civil War Novels of Francisco Ayala, "Muertes de perro" and "El fondo del vaso."

1981 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 373
Author(s):  
Thomas Mermall ◽  
Maryellen Bieder
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
War Novels ◽  
Narrative Perspective

scholarly journals War and the subaltern: Voice as power in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-89
Author(s):  
Ogbu Chukwuka Nwachukwu ◽  
Oyeh O. Otu ◽  
Onyekachi Eni
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Common People ◽  
War Novels ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Nigerian Civil War ◽  
War Discourse

In Africa, as in most other parts of the world, whenever there is war (or massive violence of any other hue), the common people are used as cannon fodder to protect the powerful upper class formulators of the letters of the war. Women and children are easily the most vulnerable. They are raped, tortured, murdered, starved, widowed, and exposed to all sorts of insecurity and depredation. In the end they are marginally characterized in upper class, male-centered war discourse. In this research, we locate the voice of the subaltern in Buchi Emecheta’s civil war novel, Destination Biafra (1982). We utilize Subaltern Studies in a qualitative approach to offer the needed agency to female subalterns as well as a few other marginalized groups. We map the trajectory of these voices and show that the subaltern woman and the other margins denounce colonial complicity in the androcentric war, and would rather the society eschewed violence as conflict resolution strategy. With this study we fill an existing gulf in the Nigerian Civil War narrative and create an alternative discourse against the largely upper class, male-centered voices that have hitherto characterized civil war novels.

The Pícaro at War: Vernacular Language and Violent Conflict in Grimmelshausen and Saro-Wiwa

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (5) ◽  
pp. 1284-1298
Author(s):  
Philip Joseph
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Structural Similarity ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Violent Conflict ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
War Novels ◽  
Vernacular Language ◽  
Official Status ◽  
Postwar Culture

This essay compares Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus (1669) and Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy (1985), approaching them as picaresque war novels that tell the story of a vernacular language becoming literary through brutal war. Despite differences of language, nation, and time, the novels of Grimmelshausen and Saro-Wiwa share a structural similarity traceable to their respective postwar contexts. These novels rewrite the expected relation between war and language. Instead of privileging the damage done to speech, they authorize a spoken language through the medium of a highly mobile rogue protagonist. Grimmelshausen and Saro-Wiwa contend with the question of whether a language, lacking the official status guaranteed by a sovereign state, is strong enough to constitute and represent a territory divided by civil war. In their works, war tears apart a territory and lays the foundation for its autonomous postwar culture all at once.

scholarly journals Enemy as the "Other" in Novels of Spain Civil War(by Stress on L'Espoir‬)

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 26
Author(s):  
Aghajani Kalkhoran Somayeh
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
War Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
War Novels ◽  
Andre Malraux

The most obvious type of "Other" in War Literature is the enemy which militate against 'self" forces. In fighting with foreign enemy we clearly know the "Other" but in Civil Wars recognition of it is not easy. "Other" in Civil War comes from "Self" forces, "self" turns to "Other" in way sometimes we cannot distinguish between them. The identity of this "Other" is in border; sometimes is "Self" and sometimes is the "Other" during the novel. This research is done to answer to this question: Is enemy as an "Other" different and variable in war novels? Is the process of making "Other" is different in militating with internal and external enemy? This survey uses the theories of Cultural Studies about representation of "Other" and "Self" in studying the novel of L'Espoir (The Hope) written by Andre Malraux which is about the Civil War of Spain. The study shows that how and in which process during the novel, "Self" and the "Other" turn to each other. It represents in comparison with novels about war between two foreign enemy and country, the enemy is the "Other" throughout the story, in the most Civil War novels such as L'Espoir (The Hope), because of the same nation, in somewhere the distinguishing border between "Self" and the "Other" becomes defaced so in some cases there is a doubt including enemy as the "Other".

scholarly journals The Silence of Compliance: Child Soldier Trauma Narratives in Contemporary African War Novels

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 1540-1547
Author(s):  
Vinod Kumar V ◽  
Gayathri S
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Child Soldiers ◽  
Child Soldier ◽  
Trauma Narratives ◽  
New Approach ◽  
War Novels ◽  
Grey Area

The victimhood of child soldiers is without any argument, a fact. In many wars, the illegitimate conscription of children under the age of eighteen has resulted in severe repercussions in the mental health of the child soldiers even after the war. Child soldier trauma depicted through many literary artifacts shows the intensity and gravity of the situation. The novels by Uzodinma Iweala, Chris Abani, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie viz Beasts of No Nation, Song for Night and Half of a Yellow Sun address the issue of child soldier conscription, the resultant trauma, and the slim chances of the betterment of the children even after the war is over. The paper moves toward acknowledging the victimhood of these children but at the same raising concerns about the agency of the trauma. The role of the child soldiers as perpetrators beyond their status of being victims and the necessity to provide proper psychosocio care to avert trauma and impending disorder in the society. A new approach concerning the grey area of in-betweenness in the victim/victimiser binary is needed while analysing desperate times like that of the Biafran civil war.

scholarly journals War in the Short Stories by Ambrose Bierce “What I Saw of Shiloh” and “Killed at Resaca”

2020 ◽  
pp. 111-121
Author(s):  
Irina Arkhangelskaya ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
War Novels ◽  
The North ◽  
War Experience ◽  
Ambrose Bierce ◽  
The Military ◽  
War Stories ◽  
Literary Devices

The article considers the martial theme in Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War novels. With the help of historical, systematic, and comparative methods of research as well as content analysis, the author attempts to determine how the writer depicts the war, what his attitude to the conflict between the North and the South is, and how his war experience relates to his creative work. She focuses on two Civil War stories “What I Saw of Shilohˮ (1881) and “Killed at Resacaˮ (1887), paying special attention to connections between those texts. Bierce wrote about the war events in which he participated. He was not looking for fame and had no intention to glorify the military actions or combatants. Bierce’s Civil War stories are based on literary paradox and the principle of contradiction. Routine situations, in which his characters find themselves, always turn into something extraordinary. “What I Saw of Shilohˮ has a special place among Bierce’s war stories, since here he incorporates literary devices into a factual narrative, employing topographic accuracy in battle description, hyperorality in reporting deaths, and a clearly ironic approach to senseless heroism. Horror, fear, and death feature as key motifs in the writer’s creative work. Bierce wants the reader to remember the war without waxing nostalgic about the glorious past: his officers in white uniforms on white horses die in ugly ways, and those whom they loved quickly forget them (“Killed at Resacaˮ). By employing the illogical and irrational in his stories, Bierce compels the reader to decry the illogicality and irrationality of war.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document