Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Pears, Sean

Titel

Militant Optimists: How Anti-Slavery Poets Reconstructed Citizenship After Appomattox

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This dissertation examines poetry written in the United States during and about the Reconstruction period by a group of writers whose careers before the Civil War had been dedicated to or significantly influenced by the anti-slavery movement. Its premise is that Reconstruction was the “second revolution” for the United States, a radical expansion of the terms of citizenship that would have succeeded better had it been implemented more rigorously and for longer. Overlaid on this interpretation are recent historical studies emphasizing the importance of violence and sovereignty to the historical developments of Reconstruction. While influential analyses of postbellum culture have observed a general disillusionment with political radicalism (especially the abolition movement) as a result of the overwhelming destruction and loss of life during the Civil War, this study suggests that this disillusionment is characteristic only of a small, albeit influential, group of bourgeois writers. The central finding is that attendant to the “second revolution” in democracy was a flourishing of innovative poetry that rejected such disillusionment and sought instead to expand the scope of new emergent forms of democratic citizenship. In narrative poems about the Southern black peasantry by Frances Harper, Union veteran lyrics by Richard Realf, and black revolutionary epyllions by James Madison Bell and James Monroe Whitfield, the Blochian “militant optimism” of anti-slavery verse is carried over and translated into the Reconstruction context. Their ability to do so correlates with the maintenance of their antebellum “literary praxis,” a dialectical relationship between literary art and practical pro-democratic action.