William Gilmore Simms's Selected Reviews on Literature and Civilization
William Gilmore Simms's Selected Reviews on Literature and Civilization

Author: William Gilmore Simms

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2014-02-07

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1611172969

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During William Gilmore Simms's life (1806-1870), book reviews and critical essays became vital parts of American literary culture and intellectual discourse. Simms was an assiduous reviewer and essayist, proving by example the importance of those genres. William Gilmore Simms's Selected Reviews on Literature and Civilization publishes for the first time in book form sixty-two examples of the writer's hundreds of newspaper and periodical reviews and book notes as well as four important critical essays. Together, the reviews and essays reveal the regional, national, and international dimensions of Simms's intellectual interests. To frame the two distinct parts of Selected Reviews, James Everett Kibler, Jr., and David Moltke-Hansen have written a general introduction that considers the development of book reviewing and the authorship of essays in cultural and historical contexts. In part one, Kibler offers an introduction that examines Simms's reviewing habits and the aesthetic and critical values that informed the author's reviews. Kibler then publishes selected texts of reviews and provides historical and cultural backgrounds for each selection. Simms was an early proponent of the critical theories of Romantics such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edgar Allan Poe. Widely read in European history and literature, he reviewed works published in French, German, and classics in original Greek and Latin and in translation. Simms also was an early, ardent advocate of works of local color and of southern "backwoods" humorists of his day. Simms published notices of seven of Herman Melville's novels, the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and favorably reviewed Henry David Thoreau's Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Simms published numerous review essays of twenty thousand or more words in literary journals and also republished two collections in book form. These volumes treated such subjects as Americanism in literature and the American Revolution in South Carolina. Yet, as part two of Selected Reviews demonstrates, Simms ranged much more widely in the intellectual milieu. Such cultural and political topics as the 1848 revolution in France, the history of the literary essay, the roles of women in the American Revolution, and the activities of the southern convention in Nashville in 1850 captured Simms's attention. Moltke-Hansen's introduction to part two examines Simms's roles in, and responses to, the Romantic critical revolution and the other revolutions then roiling Europe and America.

William Gilmore Simms's Selected Reviews on Literature and Civilization
William Gilmore Simms's Selected Reviews on Literature and Civilization

Author: William Gilmore Simms

Publisher: William Gilmore SIMMs Initiati

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781611172959

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During William Gilmore Simms's life (1806-1870), book reviews and critical essays became vital parts of American literary culture and intellectual discourse. Simms was an assiduous reviewer and essayist, proving by example the importance of those genres. William Gilmore Simms's Selected Reviews on Literature and Civilization publishes for the first time in book form sixty-two examples of the writer's hundreds of newspaper and periodical reviews and book notes as well as four important critical essays. Together, the reviews and essays reveal the regional, national, and international dimensions of Simms's intellectual interests. To frame the two distinct parts of Selected Reviews, James Everett Kibler, Jr., and David Moltke-Hansen have written a general introduction that considers the development of book reviewing and the authorship of essays in cultural and historical contexts. In part one, Kibler offers an introduction that examines Simms's reviewing habits and the aesthetic and critical values that informed the author's reviews. Kibler then publishes selected texts of reviews and provides historical and cultural backgrounds for each selection. Simms was an early proponent of the critical theories of Romantics such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edgar Allan Poe. Widely read in European history and literature, he reviewed works published in French, German, and classics in original Greek and Latin and in translation. Simms also was an early, ardent advocate of works of local color and of southern "backwoods" humorists of his day. Simms published notices of seven of Herman Melville's novels, the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and favorably reviewed Henry David Thoreau's Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Simms published numerous review essays of twenty thousand or more words in literary journals and also republished two collections in book form. These volumes treated such subjects as Americanism in literature and the American Revolution in South Carolina. Yet, as part two of Selected Reviews demonstrates, Simms ranged much more widely in the intellectual milieu. Such cultural and political topics as the 1848 revolution in France, the history of the literary essay, the roles of women in the American Revolution, and the activities of the southern convention in Nashville in 1850 captured Simms's attention. Moltke-Hansen's introduction to part two examines Simms's roles in, and responses to, the Romantic critical revolution and the other revolutions then roiling Europe and America.

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.

The Field of Honor
The Field of Honor

Author: John Mayfield

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2017-02-17

Total Pages: 587

ISBN-13: 1611177294

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Current research on the history and evolution of moral standards and their role in Southern society For more than thirty years, the study of honor has been fundamental to understanding southern culture and history. Defined chiefly as reputation or public esteem, honor penetrated virtually every aspect of southern ethics and behavior, including race, gender, law, education, religion, and violence. In The Field of Honor: Essays on Southern Character and American Identity, editors John Mayfield and Todd Hagstette bring together new research by twenty emerging and established scholars who study the varied practices and principles of honor in its American context, across an array of academic disciplines. Following pathbreaking works by Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Dickson D. Bruce, and Edward L. Ayers, this collection notes that honor became a distinctive mark of southern culture and something that—alongside slavery—set the South distinctly off from the rest of the United States. This anthology brings together the work of a variety of writers who collectively explore both honor's range and its limitations, revealing a South largely divided between the demands of honor and the challenges of an emerging market culture—one common to the United States at large. They do so by methodologically examining legal studies, market behaviors, gender, violence, and religious and literary expressions. Honor emerges here as a tool used to negotiate modernity's challenges rather than as a rigid tradition and set of assumptions codified in unyielding rules and rhetoric. Some topics are traditional for the study of honor, some are new, but all explore the question: how different really is the South from America writ large? The Field of Honor builds an essential bridge between two distinct definitions of southern—and, by extension, American—character and identity.

Writing War and Reunion
Writing War and Reunion

Author: Jeffery J. Rogers

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2020-08-25

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1643360906

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A collection of Civil War and Reconstruction era journalism by one of the most popular and acclaimed authors of the antebellum South. Nineteenth-century writer William Gilmore Simms was once considered the South’s premier literary figure, with achievements including more than twenty major novels, several volumes of poetry, and biographies of important figures in American history. Less well known are his newspaper writings, which include fascinating and trenchant work from the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Writing War and Reunion offers a selection of the best of Simms’s articles and editorials from that period, offering a window into his thoughts on the conflict and its deeply fraught resolution. In the decades following the Civil War, Simms’s reputation suffered a steady decline. Because of his associations with the antebellum South, slavery, and Confederate defeat, as well as changes in literary tastes, Simms came to be regarded as a talented but failed Southern author of a bygone era. Today a robust scholarly literature has reexamined Simms and finds him to have been an important figure in the development of nineteenth-century American literature and worthy of serious study.

Dixie Redux
Dixie Redux

Author: Raymond Arsenault

Publisher: NewSouth Books

Published: 2013-11-01

Total Pages: 506

ISBN-13: 1603062750

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Dixie Redux: Essays in Honor of Sheldon Hackney is a collection of original essays written by some of the nation’s most distinguished historians. Each of the contributors has a personal as well as a professional connection to Sheldon Hackney, a distinguished scholar in his own right who has served as Provost of Princeton University, president of Tulane University and the University of Pennsylvania, and the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In a variety of roles–teacher, mentor, colleague, administrator, writer, and friend–Sheldon Hackney has been a source of wisdom, empowerment, and wise counsel during more than four decades of historical and educational achievement. His life, both inside and outside the academy, has focused on issues closely related to civil rights, social justice, and the vagaries of race, class, regional culture, and national identity. Each of the essays in this volume touches upon one or more of these important issues–themes that have animated Sheldon Hackney’s scholarly and professional life.

Reconstruction beyond 150
Reconstruction beyond 150

Author: Orville Vernon Burton

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2023-08-21

Total Pages: 479

ISBN-13: 0813949874

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No period of United States history is more important and still less understood than Reconstruction. Now, at the sesquicentennial of the Reconstruction era, Vernon Burton and Brent Morris bring together the best new scholarship on the critical years after the Civil War and before the onset of Jim Crow, synthesizing social, political, economic, and cultural approaches to understanding this crucial period. Reconstruction was the most progressive period in United States history. Although marred by frequent violence and tragedy, it was a revolutionary era that offered hope, opportunity, and against all odds, a new birth of freedom for all Americans. Even though many of the gains of Reconstruction were rolled back and replaced with a repressive social and legal regime for African Americans, the radical spark was never fully extinguished. Its spirit fanned back into flame with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and its ramifications remain palpable to this day.

Pirates and Devils
Pirates and Devils

Author: Nicholas G. Meriwether

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2015-07-14

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1611174570

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Two of the final short novels from the literary manuscripts of William Gilmore Simms, unfinished before his death Pirates and Devils, edited by Nicholas G. Meriwether and David W. Newton, presents two of the most significant unfinished works by William Gilmore Simms, a prominent public intellectual of the antebellum South and one of the most prolific literary writers of the nineteenth century. These two incomplete works—the pirate romance, "The Brothers of the Coast," and the folk fable, "Sir Will O' Wisp"—are representative of the some of the last major primary texts of Simms's expansive career. Recent scholarship about Simms, including William Gilmore Simms's Unfinished Civil War, reasserts the significance of Simms's postwar writing and makes this volume's contribution timely. Left unfinished at his death, these two substantial fragments represent the last of the major primary texts from the final phase of Simms's life to be published. Together, the texts provide greater insight into Simms's creative process, but more importantly, they show Simms continuing to wrestle with the issues he faced in the aftermath of the Civil War, and they document the creativity and courage that commitment represented—and required. The publication of these fragments makes possible a complete picture of this last phase of Simms's life, as he struggled with the consequences of a conflict that had become the defining event of his life, career, and region.

Taking Root
Taking Root

Author: James Everett Kibler, Jr.

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2017-06-27

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 1611177758

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Collected essays by two of America's earliest environmental authors retain relevance today William Summer founded the renowned Pomaria Nursery, which thrived from the 1840s to the 1870s in central South Carolina and became the center of a bustling town that today bears its name. The nursery grew into one of the most important American nurseries of the antebellum period, offering wide varieties of fruit trees and ornamentals to gardeners throughout the South. Summer also published catalogs containing well-selected and thoroughly tested varieties of plants and assisted his brother, Adam, in publishing several agricultural journals throughout the 1850s until 1862. In Taking Root, James Everett Kibler, Jr., collects for the first time the nature writing of William and Adam Summer, two of America's earliest environmental authors. Their essays on sustainable farm practices, reforestation, local food production, soil regeneration, and respect for Mother Earth have surprising relevance today. The Summer brothers owned farms in Newberry and Lexington Counties, where they created veritable experimental stations for plants adapted to the southern climate. At its peak the nursery offered more than one thousand varieties of apples, pears, peaches, plums, figs, apricots, and grapes developed and chosen specifically for the southern climate, as well as offering an equal number of ornamentals, including four hundred varieties of repeat-blooming roses. The brothers experimented with and reported on sustainable farm practices, reforestation, land reclamation, soil regeneration, crop diversity rather than the prevalent cotton monoculture, and animal breeds accustomed to hot climates from Carolina to Central Florida. Written over a span of two decades, their essays offer an impressive environmental ethic. By 1860 Adam had concluded that a person's treatment of nature is a moral issue. Sustainability and long-term goals, rather than get-rich-quick schemes, were key to this philosophy. The brothers' keen interest in literature is evident in the quality of their writing; their essays and sketches are always readable, sometimes poetic, and occasionally humorous and satiric. A representative sampling of their more-than-six hundred articles appear in this volume.

Visions of Glory
Visions of Glory

Author: Kathleen Diffley

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2019-11-01

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0820355941

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Visions of Glory brings together twenty-two images and twenty-two brisk essays, each essay connecting an image to the events that unfolded during a particular year of the Civil War. The book focuses on a diverse set of images that include a depiction of former slaves whipping their erstwhile overseer distributed by an African American publisher, a census graph published in the New York Times, and a cutout of a child’s hand sent by a southern mother to her husband at the front. The essays in this collection reveal how wartime women and men created both written accounts and a visual register to make sense of this pivotal period. The collection proceeds chronologically, providing a nuanced history by highlighting the multiple meanings an assorted group of writers and readers discerned from the same set of circumstances. In so doing, this volume assembles contingent and fractured visions of the Civil War, but its differing perspectives also reveal a set of overlapping concerns. A number of essays focus in particular on African American engagements with visual culture. The collection also emphasizes the role that women played in making, disseminating, or interpreting wartime images. While every essay explores the relationship between image and word, several contributions focus on the ways in which Civil War images complicate an understanding of canonical writers such as Emerson, Melville, and Whitman.