A Newly Discovered American Sonnet Sequence

PMLA ◽  
1925 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 910-920
Author(s):  
Edward S. Bradley
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Conventional Form ◽  
Leigh Hunt ◽  
Daniel Webster ◽  
To Come

The American sonnet before the Civil War is not a rich field. Few of our literary men had written in this difficult and conventional form. Some, like James Gates Percival and William G. Simms, wrote poems of fourteen lines in such eccentric variations as to defy classification. A few, like Jones Very or Park Benjamin, hid an occasional fine sonnet among numerous negligible ones. Some, like David Humphreys and Washington Allston, achieved mere mixed echoes of English originals. Among the major poets before the War, Bryant wrote five and Lowell twenty-seven sonnets. Longfellow, whose great period of sonnet writing was yet to come, had written but nine sonnets in 1861. Compared with these poets, George Henry Boker stands alone, both for the quality and quantity of his work. By his contemporaries he was regarded as the greatest American sonnet writer. The Book of the Sonnet,1 a collection of American and English Sonnets, edited by Leigh Hunt and S. Adams Lee, is dedicated to Boker. Both in the text and introduction he is given more space than any other American. The editors' phrase, “such sonnets as those of Wordsworth in English and George Henry Boker in American literature” indicates the height of his contemporary reputation. The Philadelphia Press, December 22, 1881, tells the story of Boker's confusion, when as a young man, he attended a dinner addressed by Daniel Webster, who, in the midst of his discourse, acknowledged Boker's presence and recited his beautiful “Lear and Cordelia” from start to finish, to illustrate a point.

Book Review: From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature

2012 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-166
Author(s):  
Harold K. Bush
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
American Literature

“An act of discretion”: Evangelical Conformity and the Puritan Dons

1986 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 581-599 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margo Todd
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
English History ◽  
Ultimate Failure ◽  
To Come ◽  
Church Historians

In recent years, church historians have been paying increasing attention to the characters who populate that troublesome “middle ground” of the Elizabethan religious settlement. Neither doctrinaire conformists nor hot gospellers, these adherents of the “religion of protestants” have heretofore had their role in English history minimized simply because they did not fit neatly into the usual historiographic categories, and our view of Elizabethan and early Stuart religious history has thereby been simplified at the expense of accuracy. The orthodoxy now being established instead is that most English protestants in the decades before the Civil War found themselves nearer the middle than the ends of the religious spectrum. The religion of protestants turns out to be the religion of Chaderton and Hutton, Morton and Carleton, rather than that of Laud or of Ames.But now we face a new problem—what do we do with the middle? In particular, what do we do with the ultimate failure of the middle to keep the extremists from each other's throats? The fact of war still looms large on the Stuart horizon, and ending our accounts of the religion of protestants in 1603 or 1625 does not quite eliminate the problem of conflict to come. Where was the middle in 1640?

Conclusion

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoltan Barany
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
General Theory ◽  
Democratic Governance ◽  
Military Rule ◽  
Civil Military Relations ◽  
Democratic Rule ◽  
To Come ◽  
Military Relations

This concluding chapter assesses the arguments of this study. The fundamental contention of this book is that consolidated democracies cannot exist without military elites committed to democratic governance, that their support is a necessary if insufficient condition of democratization. It also argues that the six settings—major war, civil war, military rule, communism, colonialism, and (re)unification and apartheid—present different challenges to would-be democratizers intent on crafting democratic armies and civil–military relations. Finally, it contends that it is virtually impossible to come up with a general theory that provides substantive and useful explanations for civil–military relations in such diverse political and socioeconomic environments. The chapter then outlines the policies and conditions that advance or inhibit the development of armies supportive of democratic rule.

The locomotive and the tree: industrial Pittsburgh's late nineteenth-century literary culture

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Brianne Jaquette
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Carnegie Museum ◽  
Regional Literature ◽  
University Of Missouri ◽  
Nineteenth Century American Literature ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
To Come

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] In The Locomotive and the Tree, I challenge the popular myth that the city of Pittsburgh was devoid of literary culture prior to the construction of the Carnegie museum, library, and concert hall in 1895. Pittsburgh, in fact, had a robust and thriving culture in general and specifically a literary scene that was rooted in newspaper production and was invested in the industrial aspects of the city�s growth. Much of the literary material coming from Pittsburgh was nonfiction or poetry, and it was in these forms that writers in Pittsburgh were able to come to terms with the changes taking place in a rapidly industrializing city. In contrast to scholarship that has emphasized the role of regional literature in this time period, my project uses periodical and print culture studies to analyze the localized literary culture of Pittsburgh. Instead of looking broadly at national literary culture that was disseminated from the East Coast outward, I argue for the need for research that broadens the scope of late-nineteenth century American literature by examining smaller networks of print.

From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature (review)

2012 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-121
Author(s):  
A. E. Elmore
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
American Literature

Working Alongside each other for 30 Years: Jeronimo Camposeco, Allan Burns and Maya Communities in Florida

2012 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-12
Author(s):  
Jeronimo Camposeco ◽  
Allan Burns
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
The United States ◽  
Parochial School ◽  
Temporary Work ◽  
Economic Problems ◽  
The People ◽  
To Come ◽  
San Rafael

Although the Maya Diaspora is often seen as the result of the Civil War in Guatemala during the 1980s, small numbers of Maya were becoming experienced travelers to El Norte from the 1970s. I was a teacher at the Acatec Parochial School of San Miguel starting in 1960, and the people in that area had great economic problems from unproductive lands. Much of the land was stony and the fields were located on the slopes of the mountains, therefore people went to look for temporary work in the lowland plantations. Many people ventured to the nearby cities: Comitan and Comalapa, Chiapas, Mexico, to get clothes, hats, shoes, food and drinks to sell in their villages. One of them, Juan Diego from San Rafael, in one of his trips in early 1970, met a Mexican who told him about economic opportunities in the United States. Afterward they decided to go to Los Angeles, California. Later on, he helped his friend Jose Francisco Aguirre (Chepe) from San Miguel to come to Los Angeles.

Reconstructing Revenge: Race and Justice after the Civil War

2019 ◽  
Vol 91 (4) ◽  
pp. 751-781
Author(s):  
Gregory Laski
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Colored People ◽  
True Meaning ◽  
Literary Period

Abstract This essay reconsiders the politics of African American literature after the Civil War by focusing on revenge as a response to the wrong of slavery. Though forgiveness dominates literary and historical scholarship, I assemble an archive of real and imagined instances of vengeance in black-authored texts from the period following formal emancipation to the dawn of the twentieth century: the petitions of the freedmen of Edisto Island, South Carolina; the minutes of the 1865 Virginia State Convention of Colored People; the narrative of the ex-slave Samuel Hall; and the Colored American Magazine’s coverage of the lynching of Louis Wright. Reading these works alongside Pauline E. Hopkins’s Winona (1902), I show how her novel develops a philosophy of righteous revenge that reclaims the true meaning of justice in a democracy. Ultimately, this archive can help us not only to examine anew a neglected literary period but also to reimagine racial justice, then and now.

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