[PDF] Macaria Or Altars Of Sacrifice A Novel eBook

Author : Augusta Jane Evans
Publisher : LSU Press
Page : 454 pages
File Size : 15,27 MB
Release : 1992-08-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780807116623

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First published in 1864, Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice was the third novel of Augusta Jane Evans, one of the leading women writers of nineteenth-century domestic fiction. A wartime best seller, with more than twenty thousand copies in circulation in the print-starved Confederacy before the war’s end, the novel was also extremely well received along the Union front, so much so that some northern officials thought it should be banned. Long out of print and largely unavailable until now, Macaria is a compelling narrative about women and war. In Macaria, Evans charts the journey of two southern women toward ultimate self-realization through their service in the war-torn Confederacy. Discarding the theme of romantic fulfillment, Evans skillfully crafts a novel about women compelled by the departure and death of so many southern men to find meaning in their own “single blessedness,” rather than in marriage. Drew Gilpin Faust, in her perceptive introduction to this edition, places the novel in the context of the concerns of Confederate nationalism and the contributions of women during the Civil War. She provides an ideological and historical framework within which to interpret the novel and introduce it to a new generation of readers. Largely overlooked in the current revival of women’s fiction, Augusta Jane Evans is less well known today than she should be. The reissue of this volume will do much to garner Evans a well-deserved place in the existing body of American literature, and especially southern and women’s literature.

Author : Coleman Hutchison
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 294 pages
File Size : 13,34 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0820337315

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Apples and Ashes offers the first literary history of the Civil War South. The product of extensive archival research, it tells an expansive story about a nation struggling to write itself into existence. Confederate literature was in intimate conversation with other contemporary literary cultures, especially those of the United States and Britain. Thus, Coleman Hutchison argues, it has profound implications for our understanding of American literary nationalism and the relationship between literature and nationalism more broadly. Apples and Ashes is organized by genre, with each chapter using a single text or a small set of texts to limn a broader aspect of Confederate literary culture. Hutchison discusses an understudied and diverse archive of literary texts including the literary criticism of Edgar Allan Poe; southern responses to Uncle Tom's Cabin; the novels of Augusta Jane Evans; Confederate popular poetry; the de facto Confederate national anthem, “Dixie”; and several postwar southern memoirs. In addition to emphasizing the centrality of slavery to the Confederate literary imagination, the book also considers a series of novel topics: the reprinting of European novels in the Confederate South, including Charles Dickens's Great Expectations and Victor Hugo's Les Misérables; Confederate propaganda in Europe; and postwar Confederate emigration to Latin America. In discussing literary criticism, fiction, poetry, popular song, and memoir, Apples and Ashes reminds us of Confederate literature's once-great expectations. Before their defeat and abjection—before apples turned to ashes in their mouths—many Confederates thought they were in the process of creating a nation and a national literature that would endure.