Fire and Fiction [antikvár]

Introduction: Reconstructing Augusta Evans's Cultural EnvironmentThis book offers mainly, although not exclusively, a cultural analysis of Augusta Jane Evans's work. Though Evans, a nineteenth-century American writer of bestsellers, was widely known among her contemporaries, she and her works have almost sunk into oblivion in the twentieth century. My personal interest in Southern culture, literature, and history underlies my effort to rediscover this Southern author, who was popular in her day and held in high esteem. Evans's personal correspondence and her novels not only reflect her southernness, but also testify to her efforts to influence contemporary social and political developments in the American South. For instance, at the time of the Civil War Evans's third novel, Macaria (1864), in which she strongly defends the Confederate cause against what she called Northern despotism, was considered important and dangerous enough for Federal General Thomas to forbid his soldiers to read it (Fidler 1951, 107). Copies of the book were burned. Her fourth book, St. Elmo (1866), one of the most successful novels published in nineteenth-century America (Baym 1993, 276), can be regarded as the ideal example of the sentimental domestic novel, a literary genre that was popular in the North and the South between the 1820s and 1880s. In my final chapter, as an epilogue, I discuss how the final works of Augusta Jane Evans shade into a successor genre to the domestic novel: that of the artist novel. I try to show this development by discussing, alongside with Augusta Jane Evans's later works, Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) and Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark (1915).My research into Augusta Evans's work and its context inscribes itself in the present renewed interest in nineteenth-century women's literature. As a consequence of the ongoing process of rediscovery, many novels by nineteenth-century American authors, previously unavailable