Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War

Edmund Wilson

W. W. Norton & Company, 1994 - Literary Criticism - 816 pages

Regarded by many critics as Edmund Wilson's greatest book, Patriotic Gore brilliantly portrays the vast political, spiritual, and material crisis of the Civil War as reflected in the lives and writings of some thirty representative Americans. His critical/biographical portraits of such notable figures as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Ambrose Bierce, Mary Chesnut, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Oliver Wendell Holmes prove Wilson to be the consummate witness to the most eloquently recorded era in American history.

What people are saying

Review: Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War

User Review  - Foxessa Wolfram-Hart - Goodreads

Edmund Wilson was a significant literary and social critic in his lifetime -- not to mention a passionate, rejected, suitor of Edna St. Vincent Millay -- but more lately his work has gone into eclipse ...

Review: Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War

User Review  - Eddy Allen - Goodreads

Critical/biographical portraits of such notable figures as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Ambrose Bierce, Mary Chesnut, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Oliver Wendell Holmes prove Wilson to be the consummate witness to the most eloquently recorded era in American history.

Contents

• Harriet Beecher Stowe: 3
• Calvin Stowe Francis Grierson The Battle Hymn: 59
• Abraham Lincoln: 99
• Ulysses S Grant: 131
• John T Trowbridge: 219
• Charlotte Forten: 239
• Kate Stone Sarah: 258
• Richard Taylor John: 299
• William: 336
• Alexander H Stephens: 380
• The Myth of the Old South Sidney Lanier: 438
• Albion: 529
• Ambrose Bierce on the Owl Creek Bridge: 617
• The Chastening of American Prose Style John: 635
• Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: 743
• Index: 797

About the author

Wilson roamed the world and read widely in many languages. He was a journalist for leading literary periodicals: Vanity Fair, where he was briefly managing editor; The New Republic, where he was associate editor for five years; and the New Yorker, where he was book reviewer in the 1940s. These varied experiences were typical of Wilson's range of interests and ability. Eternally productive and endlessly readable, he conquered American literature in countless essays. If he is idiosyncratic and lacks a rigid mold, that probably contributes to his success as a literary critic, since he was not committed to interpretation in the straitjacket of some popular approach or dogma. His critical position suits his cosmopolitan background---historical and sociological considerations prevail. He went through a brief Marxist period and experimented with Freudian criticism. Axel's Castle (1931), a penetrating analysis of the symbolist writer, has exerted a great influence on contemporary literary criticism. Its dedication, to Christian Gauss of Princeton, reads:"It was principally from you that I acquired.. .my idea of what literary criticism ought to be---a history of man's ideas and imaginings in the setting of the conditions which have shaped them."His volume of satiric short stories, Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), with its frankly erotic passages, was the subject of court cases in a less tolerant decade than the present one. It was Wilson's own favorite among his writings, but he complained that those individuals who like his other work tend to disregard it.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War
• Author: Edmund Wilson
• Edition: reprint, reissue
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994
• ISBN: 0393312569, 9780393312560
• Length: 816 pages
• Subjects: History / Military / General; History / United States / Civil War Period (1850-1877); Literary Criticism / American / General