Description:
During the Civil War and Reconstruction, popular magazines throughout the country published hundreds of short narratives that confronted or evaded the meaning of the Union's great crisis. Yet despite their importance as a measure of the era's cultural temper, these stories have remain largely unexamined in studies of Civil War literature. Where My Heart is Turning Ever seeks to recover the significance of this forgotten body of writing. Unearthing more than three hundred stories from sixteen magazines in the South and West as well as the culturally dominant Northeast, Kathleen Diffley examines the effort of popular writers and publications to contain the disruption caused by the war and its aftermath. That effort, she shows, proved especially precarious when writers took up matters of race, political section, and gender.
"Especially impressive is the innovative structure of this work, which interlaces the tasks of literary and cultural historian, editor, and literary critic. . . . Where My Heart Is Turning Ever is at once an impressive study and a genuinely good read."
-Priscilla Wald, Journal of American History
Brief description: KATHLEEN DIFFLEY is professor emerita at the University of Iowa and director of the Civil War Caucus. She is the author of The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861-1876 (Georgia) and editor of Witness to Reconstruction: Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Postbellum South, 1873-1894.
Review Quotes: An extremely well-crafted study, concentrating on some three hundred narratives.--S. M. Grant "Journal of American Studies"