Unraveling the Reconstruction
Between the American novels “Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty” and “The Red Badge of Courage” lies … not much. To Amanda Claybaugh, that’s a mystery that needs unraveling. After all, it means that the literary heart is missing from one of the nation’s most wrenching times, the bitter Reconstruction years when the United States mourned its Civil War dead, tallied its losses, and painfully re-incorporated the South into the Union. Authorities on 19th century literature routinely divide the century into the time before and after the Civil War, but Claybaugh said the period between the war’s conclusion and the end of the Reconstruction, roughly from 1865 to 1880, is something of a literary desert. Claybaugh, who was named a professor of English and American literature and language in July, wants to know not only what was written during that period, but also what that can tell us about society at the...