Southern Literary Messenger 18

In this groundbreaking work of cultural history, Alice Fahs explores a little-known and fascinating side of the Civil War--the outpouring of popular literature inspired by the conflict. From 1861 to 1865, authors and publishers in both the North and the South produced a remarkable variety of war-related compositions, including poems, songs, children's stories, romances, novels, histories, and even humorous pieces. Fahs mines these rich but long-neglected resources to recover the diversity of the war's political and social meanings. Instead of narrowly portraying the Civil War as a clash between two great, white armies, popular literature offered a wide range of representations of the conflict and helped shape new modes of imagining the relationships of diverse individuals to the nation. Works that explored the war's devastating impact on white women's lives, for example, proclaimed the importance of their experiences on the home front, while popular writings that celebrated black manhood and heroism in the wake of emancipation helped readers begin to envision new roles for blacks in American life. Recovering a lost world of popular literature, The Imagined Civil War adds immeasurably to our understanding of American life and letters at a pivotal point in our history.

The Southern Literary Messenger enjoyed an impressive thirty-year run (1834-1864) and was in its time the South's most important literary periodical. Published in Richmond, Virginia, the monthly magazine was edited in its early years by Edgar Allan Poe. In addition to serving as a literary proving ground for Poe, it is also remembered for publishing poems, fiction, and essays by the nation's leading authors-both male and female, northern and southern-including William Gilmore Simms, Paul Hamilton Hayne, Joseph G. Baldwin, John Pendleton Kennedy, Mary E. Lee, and Caroline Lee Hentz. In 1905 Benjamin Blake Minor (1818-1905), editor of the Southern Literary Messenger during the 1840s, wrote the only book-length study of the magazine. Minor's authoritative account of the journal's history and influence is augmented in this edition with a new introduction by historian Jonathan Daniel Wells that places the magazine and Minor's account in their historical context. Both Wells and Minor reveal significant information found nowhere else about figures and facets of southern literary culture before and during the Civil War. Minor recounts in detail the relationships he forged with notable authors and includes excerpts from correspondence with Poe and others. Most important, Minor identifies and discusses hundreds of lesser contributors who might otherwise remain anonymous.