The mystic chords of memory: Nationalism, historical novels and the American Civil War.

摘要

By analyzing best-selling Civil War novels, this study argues that historical novels are social practices fully enmeshed in the construction and perpetuation of the national "American" identity and, consequently, the individual "American" during periods of perceived social crisis. Considered are four periods when economic and social crises appeared to destabilize the nation and when historical novels were immensely popular: during the antebellum sectional crisis, the Civil War era, the "Gilded Age," and the Great Depression. Using theories drawn from British Cultural Studies, Kenneth Burke and Antonio Gramsci, I argue that historical novels, as symbolic acts, work to contain (manage, fix, cover-over) social antagonisms in a "desire" to construct a stable national identity for the dominant cultural group (a "hegemonic desire" that is always partially deferred because hegemony is never completely realized by any one cultural group).; Beginning with the antebellum fiction of James Fenimore Cooper and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the study analyzes how these writers respectively construct the national identity during the apparent chaos of the Jacksonian period and the sectional crisis. The focus then turns to the problems of constructing separate national identities during the Civil War in the works of Henry Ward Beecher, John Trowbridge, John William DeForest, James Roberts Gilmore, Horatio Alger, and Albion Tourgee. Turning to the period of the historical novel's greatest popularity (1894-1911), the analysis considers the problems of constructing a renewed national "spirit" based on racial identity in the novels of John Fox, Winston Churchill, Thomas Dixon, Thomas Nelson Page, and Ellen Glasgow. Turning from this vision of a renewed nation, Stephen Crane writes the war as a social allegory about the processes of the individual alienation--a condition caused by the industrialization of the 1890s. Finally, the focus shifts to the failure of a national identity during the Great Depression as figured in the works of Stark Young, Margaret Mitchell, and Laura Krey, Allen Tate, and William Faulkner.