Visions of Order in William Gilmore Simms

Visions of Order in William Gilmore Simms

Author: Masahiro Nakamura

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 9781570038174

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One of nineteenth-century America's foremost men of letters, William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) of Charleston, South Carolina, distinguished himself as a historian, poet, and novelist; yet his stalwart allegiance to the ideals of the Confederacy have kept him largely marginalized from the modern literary canon. In this engaging study, Masahiro Nakamura seeks to reinsert Simms in current American literary and cultural studies through a careful consideration of Simms's southern conservatism as a valuable literary counterpoint to the bourgeois individualist ideology of his northern contemporaries. For Nakamura, Simms's vision of social order runs contrary to the staunch individualism expressed in traditional American romances by authors such as James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In his thoughtful approaches to Simms's historical depictions of the making of American history and society, Nakamura finds consistent assertions of social order against the perils of literal and metaphoric wilderness, a conservative vision that he traces to the influence of Simms's southern genius loci. To understand how this southern conservatism also manifests itself in Simms's fiction, Nakamura contrasts Simms's historical romances with those of Hawthorne, as representative of the New England romance tradition, to differentiate the ways in which the two writers interpret the dynamic between the individual and society. Nakamura finds that Simms's protagonists struggle to establish their places within their culture while Hawthorne's characters are often at odds with their culture. The resulting comparison enriches our understanding of both writers.


Reading William Gilmore Simms

Reading William Gilmore Simms

Author: Todd Hagstette

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2017-08-10

Total Pages: 632

ISBN-13: 1611177731

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Engaging approaches to the vast output of South Carolina's premier man of letters William Gilmore Simms was the best known and certainly the most accomplished writer of the mid-nineteenth-century South. His literary ascent began early, with his first book being published when he was nineteen years old and his reputation as a literary genius secured before he turned thirty. Over a career that spanned nearly forty-five years, he established himself as the American South's premier man of letters—an accomplished poet, novelist, short fiction writer, essayist, historian, dramatist, cultural journalist, biographer, and editor. In Reading William Gilmore Simms, Todd Hagstette has created an anthology of critical introductions to Simms's major publications, including those recently brought back into print by the University of South Carolina Press, offering the first ever primer compendium of the author's vast output. Simms was a Renaissance man of American letters, lauded in his time by both popular audiences and literary icons alike. Yet the author's extensive output, which includes nearly eighty published volumes, can be a barrier to his study. To create a gateway to reading and studying Simms, Hagstette has assembled thirty-eight essays by twenty-four scholars to review fifty-five Simms works. Addressing all the author's major works, the essays provide introductory information and scholarly analysis of the most crucial features of Simms's literary achievement. Arranged alphabetically by title for easy access, the book also features a topical index for more targeted inquiry into Simms's canon. Detailing the great variety and astonishing consistency of Simms's thought throughout his long career as well as examining his posthumous reconsideration, Reading William Gilmore Simms bridges the author's genius and readers' growing curiosity. The only work of its kind, this book provides an essential passport to the far-flung worlds of Simms's fecund imagination.


Vasconselos

Vasconselos

Author: William Gilmore Simms

Publisher: University of Arkansas Press

Published: 2013-12-01

Total Pages: 521

ISBN-13: 1557286434

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The writings of William Gilmore Simms (1806–1870) provide a sweeping fictional portrait of the colonial and antebellum South in all of its regional diversity. Simms's account of the region is more comprehensive than that of any other author of his time; he treats the major intellectual and social issues of the South and depicts the bonds and tensions among all of its inhabitants. By the mid-1840s Simms's novels were so well known that Edgar Allan Poe could call him "the best novelist which this country has, on the whole, produced." Perhaps the darkest of Simms's novel-length works, Vasconselos (1853) presents a fictionalized account of one of the first European efforts to settle the land that would become the United States, the Hernando de Soto expedition of 1539. Set largely in Havana, Cuba, as the explorers prepare to embark, the work explores such themes as the marginalization of racial and national minorities, the historical abuse of women, and the tendency of absolute power to corrupt absolutely. In addition, Simms anticipates in this colonial romance the works of renowned scholars who would follow him, including the historian Frederick Jackson Turner and the entire formal scholarly field of psychology, which would take shape only long after the author's death.


A Southern Writer and the Civil War

A Southern Writer and the Civil War

Author: Jeffery J. Rogers

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2015-02-18

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1498502024

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Historians of the American Civil War have debated a wide range of questions raised by the war and its outcome. None have been more vigorously argued as those surrounding its outcome. One of the leading explanations for Confederate defeat has been the argument that the Civil War South lacked a national identity. Related to and supporting this argument is the contention that the Civil War South failed to produce a distinct and vibrant literary culture. These contentions have been challenged by a growing body of literature which argues that the Civil War South did produce a sense of cultural and national identity. This book adds to this counter current through an examination of the Civil War experiences and writings of the Antebellum South's leading literary figure. Surprisingly, given William Gilmore Simms' well-known status prior to the war, his life and work during the course of the war itself has been understudied. This examination reveals the depth and extent to which Simms not only supported the Confederate war effort but how Simms conceptualized and articulated a vision of Confederate nationalism.


Acts of Modernity

Acts of Modernity

Author: David Buchanan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-01

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1317029046

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In Acts of Modernity, David Buchanan reads nineteenth-century historical novels from Scotland, America, France, and Canada as instances of modern discourse reflective of community concerns and methods that were transatlantic in scope. Following on revolutionary events at home and abroad, the unique combination of history and romance initiated by Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) furthered interest in the transition to and depiction of the nation-state. Established and lesser-known novelists reinterpreted the genre to describe the impact of modernization and to propose coping mechanisms, according to interests and circumstances. Besides analysis of the chronotopic representation of modernity within and between national contexts, Buchanan considers how remediation enabled diverse communities to encounter popular historical novels in upmarket and downmarket forms over the course of the century. He pays attention to the way communication practices are embedded within and constitutive of the social lives of readers, and more specifically, to how cultural producers adapted the historical novel to dynamic communication situations. In these ways, Acts of Modernity investigates how the historical novel was repeatedly reinvented to effectively communicate the consequences of modernity as problem-solutions of relevance to people on both sides of the Atlantic.


Value and Vision in American Literature

Value and Vision in American Literature

Author: Joseph Candido

Publisher: Ohio University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0821412914

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Friends and colleagues honor the 30-year career of Appalachian-born literature scholar White with 15 essays. Their goal is to call attention to ideas or connections that demand a reappraisal of conventional attitudes or ingrained responses. Spanning from the middle 19th century to the present, they consider such well known authors as Hawthorne, Cather, and Welty but also some less known ones such as Wallace Stegner, Dunstan Thomas, and neglected Civil War poets. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR


Hans Christian Andersen in American Literary Criticism of the Nineteenth Century

Hans Christian Andersen in American Literary Criticism of the Nineteenth Century

Author: Herbert Rowland

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-11-03

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 1683932676

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In Hans Christian Andersen in American Literary Criticism of the Nineteenth Century, Herbert Rowland argues that the literary criticism accompanying the publication of Hans Christian Andersen’s works in the United States compares favorably in scope, perceptiveness, and chronological coverage with the few other national receptions of Andersen outside of Denmark. Rowland contends that American commentators made it abundantly evident that, in addition to his fairy tales, Andersen wrote several novels, travelogues, and an autobiography which were all of more than common interest. In the process, Rowland shows that American commentators “naturalized” Andersen in the United States by confronting the sensationalism in the journalism and literature of the time with the perceived wholesomeness of Andersen’s writing, deploying his long fiction on both sides of the debate over the nature and relative value of the romance and the novel, and drawing on three of his works to support their positions on slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.


The Vision of Richard Weaver

The Vision of Richard Weaver

Author: Joseph A. Scotchie

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-04-27

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1351293265

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Richard M. Weaver was one of the founders of modern conservatism. He is an enduring intellectual figure of twentieth-century America. Weaver was dedicated to examining the dual nature of human beings and the quest for civilized communities in a corrupted age that believed in the religion of science and in the "natural goodness" of man. The Vision of Richard Weaver is the first collection of essays about this seminal thinker. Thirty years after his untimely death, Richard Weaver remains a heroic figure to many conservatives and traditionalists concerned about the state of American culture. Now a new generation of readers can understand the importance of this pioneer of thought. The Vision of Richard Weaver will be of significant value to political theorists, philosophers, and students of American civilization.