Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Veteran Americans: Literature and Citizenship from Revolution to Reconstruction

Veteran Americans: Literature and Citizenship from Revolution to Reconstruction

Cooper, Benjamin

Paperback

Series: Veterans

Literary CriticismGeneral United States History

ISBN10: 1625343310
ISBN13: 9781625343314
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Published: Apr 17 2018
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.70
Height: 0.50 Width: 6.00 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

I may dare to speak, and I intend to speak and write what I think, wrote a New York volunteer serving in the Mexican War in 1848. Such sentiments of resistance and confrontation run throughout the literature produced by veteran Americans in the nineteenth century--from prisoner-of-war narratives and memoirs to periodicals, adventure pamphlets, and novels. Military men and women were active participants in early American print culture, yet they struggled against civilian prejudice about their character, against shifting collective memories that removed military experience from the nation's self-definition, and against a variety of headwinds in the uneven development of antebellum print culture.

In this new literary history of early American veterans, Benjamin Cooper reveals how soldiers and sailors from the Revolutionary War through the Civil War demanded, through their writing, that their value as American citizens and authors be recognized. Relying on an archive of largely understudied veteran authors, Cooper situates their perspective against a civilian monopoly in defining American citizenship and literature that endures to this day.

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