Reading William Gilmore Simms

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.

William Gilmore Simms's Unfinished Civil War measures the effects of the Civil War and its aftermath on one of the Old South's foremost intellectuals. Simms's mid-nineteenth-century poems, novels, and essays and the personal and societal trauma and destruction Simms experienced are all portrayed here. Before the war Simms was the most articulate advocate of Southern nationalism. During the war he became a prophetic critic of Confederate policy and poet of cultural ethnogenesis. The defeat of the Confederacy in 1865 shattered Simms's understanding of the working of history and called into question his sense of a moral providence. This collection of essays by historians and literary scholars first explores William Gilmore Simms's antebellum treatment of the role of warfare in America's past and the South's future. The contributors then consider the impact of the secession crisis, the Civil War, and the Confederate defeat on Simms's and other white and black Southerners' perceptions of their much-changed world. Next Simms's life, published writings, and thoughts during the war and its aftermath are examined. Finally Simms's late poetry and fictions, especially explicit and implicit commentaries on the postwar South, are analyzed. His last oration, The Sense of the Beautiful, published shortly before his death in 1870, is the subject of several essays. William Gilmore Simms's Unfinished Civil War reconstructs from both published writings and private letters the conscious and unconscious effects of the Civil War upon the writer and Southern patriot. Drawing on the fields of history, literature, and even archaeology, this interdisciplinary volume demonstrates that the anticipation, course, and consequences of the war were central in shaping Simms's writings from the 1840s to 1870.

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.