Week 7, April 27: Literature and the Lost Cause

Reading 1: Blight, Chapter 7, “The Literature of Reunion and its Discontents”

Question for discussion: How and why did both American fiction and the memorial landscape work toward a reconciliationist vision of a heroic southern memory?

Reading 2: W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “’Woman's hand and heart and deathless love’: White Women and the Commemorative Impulse in the New South,” in Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern Memory (2003)

Question for discussion: Why did volunteer groups of mostly white, elite women become the primary conveyors of public memory in the South in the late 19^th century? To what extent did they wield their power and what do you think about their results/impact?