American Romanticism and the Civil War

FAIN: FB-52900-07

Randall J. Fuller, PhD
Drury University (Springfield, MO 65802-3712)

"American Romanticism and the Civil War" seeks to recover the writing as well as the literary culture of a period generally regarded as a rupture in history that ended the reign of Transcendentalism and redirected writing toward realism, naturalism, and the novel of social themes. My book project traces the often-overlooked Civil War writing of canonical figures such as Emerson, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Whitman, and Melville--but it does so by contextualizing that work within residual and emergent strains of literary Romanticism and realism evident in periodicals, journals, diaries, and newspapers.