In addition, letters and journals intended for private audiences have been made available through the efforts of Civil War researchers.
Although no one prevailing tone can be identified in such a large body of literature, certain patterns do emerge. Early in the war writers tended to invoke abstract and ideological concerns such as nationhood; later, as the enormous cost in human life became apparent, individual experiences of the war became a prominent theme. The growth of American literary movements of the later nineteenth century—local color, realism, and naturalism—can be traced in large part to the war's bloody impact on American consciousness.
Antebellum Literature
Few could have anticipated that the war would completely reconfigure the American literary scene. The antebellum literary tradition saw a general flourishing of fiction as well as the formalization of certain expectations of war literature, such as patriotic poems and songs, during the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848. But even as American literature thrived in the first decades of the nineteenth century, most writers remained silent about slavery, with the exception of a number of Southern writers during the 1820s and 1830s who produced what were called plantation novels, essentially defenses of the institution of slavery.
This is a free page. This page contains 187 words. This
article contains 1,975 words (approx. 7 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our Literature Access Pass.
