Volume 37, Number 4 · March 15, 1990
The Inner Civil War
By C. Vann Woodward
Mind and the American Civil War: A Meditation on Lost Causes
by Lewis P. Simpson
Louisiana State University Press, 110 pp., $15.95
The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South
by Drew Gilpin Faust
Louisiana State University Press, 110 pp., $6.95 (paper)
In an essay on the southern imagination Allen Tate quotes an epigram from W. B. Yeats: 'Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.' Out of both we make history. But in the making of many histories of the American Civil War and in such literary treatment as the war has inspired we have somehow neglected the quarrels with ourselves. In so doing we have missed much of the poetry and tragedy of the most tragic experience in American history, and of what one poet has called 'our Homeric period.' Both of the works at hand include the inner conflicts, each in its own way.
Review, 3401 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |