William Gilmore Simms And The American Frontier

William Gilmore Simms (1807-1870), the antebellum South's foremost author and cultural critic, was the first advocate of regionalism in the creation of national literature. This collection of essays emphasizes his portrayal of America's westward migration.

Praised by critics on both sides of the Atlantic, The Wigwam and the Cabin focuses on the Southern frontier that Simms knew so well, a frontier whose vernacular, courage, humor, folklore, violence, injustice, and beauty are vividly brought to life through the strokes of his pen. "I have seen the life", Simms wrote", -- have lived it -- and much of my material...is the planter, the squatter, the Indian, the negro -- the bold and hardy pioneer, the vigorous yeomen -- these are the subjects". Simms's portrayal of frontier life is the more realistic and graphic in all nineteenth-century American literature; and the Arkansas edition of The Wigwam and the Cabin, with Dr. Guilds's fine editing and informative introduction brings back into print an invaluable contribution to the development of the short story in America. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

One of nineteenth-century America's foremost men of letters, William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) of Charleston, South Carolina, distinguished himself as a historian, poet, and novelist; yet his stalwart allegiance to the ideals of the Confederacy have kept him largely marginalized from the modern literary canon. In this engaging study, Masahiro Nakamura seeks to reinsert Simms in current American literary and cultural studies through a careful consideration of Simms's southern conservatism as a valuable literary counterpoint to the bourgeois individualist ideology of his northern contemporaries. For Nakamura, Simms's vision of social order runs contrary to the staunch individualism expressed in traditional American romances by authors such as James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In his thoughtful approaches to Simms's historical depictions of the making of American history and society, Nakamura finds consistent assertions of social order against the perils of literal and metaphoric wilderness, a conservative vision that he traces to the influence of Simms's southern genius loci. To understand how this southern conservatism also manifests itself in Simms's fiction, Nakamura contrasts Simms's historical romances with those of Hawthorne, as representative of the New England romance tradition, to differentiate the ways in which the two writers interpret the dynamic between the individual and society. Nakamura finds that Simms's protagonists struggle to establish their places within their culture while Hawthorne's characters are often at odds with their culture. The resulting comparison enriches our understanding of both writers.

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.

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.

Literary writings that reveal nineteenth-century perceptions of Native Americans; Novelist William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) and the Indians who lived in the southeast United States during the nineteenth century have shared a similar and unfortunate fate - both have been largely neglected in mainstream scholarship of literature and ethnohistory. In a volume that remedies this oversight, John Caldwell Guilds, an authority on Simms, and Charles Hudson, an authority on Southeastern Indians, collaborate to reveal fresh perspectives on both. They offer an anthology of Simms's writings that establishes him as a knowledgeable, prolific, and sympathetic portrayer of Native Americans in fiction and poetry. This groundbreaking anthology identifies more than one hundred works by Simms on Indians, including his best and most representative writings, some of which have never before been published. The passages range from romantic, poetic fantasies to attentive descriptions that are valuable primary resources for historians and anthropologists. Written from Simms's youth in the 1820s until his death in 1870, the selections document the transformation of the South from a frontier where Indians, A

Identifying the antebellum era in the United States as a transitional setting, Imagining Southern Spaces ́investigates spatialization processes about the South during a time when intensifying debates over the abolition of slavery led to a heightened period of (re)spatialization in the region. Taking the question of abolition as a major factor that shaped how different actors responded to these processes, this book studies spatial imaginations in a selection of abolitionist and proslavery literature of the era. Through this diversity of imaginations, the book points to a multitude of Souths in various economic, political, and cultural entanglements in the American Hemisphere and the Circumatlantic. Thus, it challenges monolithic and provincial representations of the South as a provincial region distinct from the rest of the country.

One of the most important volumes of short fiction published before the Civil War. The Wigwam and the Cabin represents William Gilmore Simms at his very best. It is the work that led Poe to say of Simms, ". . . in invention, in vigor, in movement, in the power of exciting interest, and in the artistical management of his themes, he has surpassed, we think, any of his countrymen." Praised by critics on both sides of the Atlantic, The Wigwam and the Cabin focuses n the Southern frontier that Simms knew so well, a frontier whose vernacular, courage, humor, folklore, violence, injustice, and beauty are vividly brought to life through the strokes of his pen. "I have seen the life," Simms wrote, "--have lived it--and much of my material . . . is the planter, the squatter, the Indian, the negro--the bold and hardy pioneer, the vigorous yeomen--these are the subjects." Simms's portrayal of frontier life is the most realistic and graphic in all nineteenth-century American literature; and the Arkansas edition of The Wigwam and the Cabin, with Dr. Guilds's fine editing and informative introductin, brings back into print an invaluable contribution to the development of the short story in America.