Literature of the Civil War

Catalog description

The works we will read this term imagine and embody a nation's survival when it faces war within its own boundaries. With a primary focus on poetry and novels, we will also look at photographs, political cartoons, recruitment posters, and trading cards-items that give a visual resonance to the iconography of national violence. Asking about gendered and racialized embodiments associated with the national project on both sides of the conflict, we will want to find out how gender, race, and nation are written into 19th-century North America.