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1 results

  • 3 - Reconstructing the Civil War Literature of Injury, Illness, and Convalescence

  • from Part I - The Blind Ruck of Event
  • Edited by Kathleen Diffley, University of Iowa, Coleman Hutchison, University of Texas, Austin
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction
    Published online:
    04 August 2022
    Print publication:
    18 August 2022, pp 43-58

  • Summary

    Restoring health to casualties of the Civil War functioned as a work of unprecedented national literary repair. Soldiers, caregivers, and civilians experienced wounding, illness, and convalescence as conditions that not only imperiled the physical body, but also symbolically disrupted the national body and psyche. Such disruptions were as visible in Whitman's poetic sites of caregiving communion as they were in the turbulence of Chesnutt's or Tourgée's Reconstruction stories, where Black heritage functioned alternately as contagion or reclamation. In fiction, poetry, and memoir, period writers explored the intimacies of caregiving, raising bedside and battlefield encounters to a trope whose racial and gendered valences limned the tragedies and absurdities of war-time loss. Describing a range of traumas from physical pain to the compromises of disability, they oversaw the emergence of the hospital narrative as a budding literary genre that, in coming to terms with the medical crisis of the war and its aftermath, established the genre that we prize today.