Witness to Reconstruction: Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Postbellum South, 1873-1894
Witness to Reconstruction: Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Postbellum South, 1873-1894
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Abstract
In the wake of the Civil War, Constance Fenimore Woolson became one of the first northern observers to linger in the defeated states from Virginia to Florida. Born in New Hampshire in 1840 and raised in Ohio, she was the grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper and was gaining success as a writer when she departed in 1873 for St. Augustine. During the next six years, she made her way across the South and reported what she saw, first in illustrated travel accounts and then in the poetry, stories, and serialized novels that brought unsettled social relations to the pages of Harper’s Monthly, the Atlantic, Scribner’s Monthly, Appletons’ Journal, and the Galaxy. In the midst of Reconstruction and in print for years to come, Woolson revealed the sharp edges of loss, the sharper summons of opportunity, and the entanglements of northern misperceptions a decade before the waves of well-heeled tourists arrived during the 1880s. This book’s sixteen chapters are intent on illuminating, through her example, the neglected world of Reconstruction’s backwaters in literary developments that were politically charged and genuinely unpredictable. Drawing upon the postcolonial and transnational perspectives of New Southern Studies, as well as the cultural history, intellectual genealogy, and feminist priorities that lend urgency to the portraits of the global South, this book investigates the mysterious, ravaged territory of a defeated nation as curious northern readers first saw it.
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Front Matter
- “People Who Remember”: The American South and Woolson’s Postbellum Sojourns
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“This Reserve of the North”: Reconstruction at Home
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“The Daughters of Carolina”: The South Beckons
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Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Origins of the Global South
John Lowe
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Tourism, Imperialism, and Hybridity in the Reconstruction South: Woolson’s Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches
Anne E. Boyd
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Henry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and the Fashioning of Southern Identity
John H. Pearson
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Woolson’s Two Women: 1862. A Civil War Romance of Irreconcilable Difference
Caroline Gebhard
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Zephaniah Swift Spalding: Constance Woolson’s Cipher
Cheryl B. Torsney
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Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Origins of the Global South
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“A Shady Retreat”: Short Prose
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Geology and Genre in Woolson’s Southern Travel Sketches
Timothy Sweet
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Reconstructing Southern Hospitality
Anthony Szczesiul
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Imagining Sites of Memory in the Post—Civil War South: The National Cemetery in Woolson’s “Rodman the Keeper”
Martin T. Buinicki
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Poking King David in His Imperial Eye/“I”: Woolson Takes On the White Man’s Burden in the Postbellum United States
Carolyn Hall
- Cypresses, Chameleons, and Snakes: Displacement in Woolson’s “The South Devil”
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Geology and Genre in Woolson’s Southern Travel Sketches
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“Burned into Us as by a Red-Hot Fire”: Novels of the South
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The Portrait of a Southern Lady in Woolson’s For the Major
Janet Gabler-Hover
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Northeast Angels: Henry James in Woolson’s Florida
Geraldine Murphy
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The Merits of Transit: Woolson’s Return to Reconstruction in Jupiter Lights
Sharon Kennedy-Nolle
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“Pioneers of Spoliation”: Woolson’s Horace Chase and the Role of Magazine Writing in the Gilded-Age Development of the South
Kevin E. O’Donnell
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The Portrait of a Southern Lady in Woolson’s For the Major
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“Shimmering Inlets”: Remembering Back, Looking Forward
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End Matter
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