Reading William Gilmore Simms
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305 pages
English

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Description

Engaging approaches to the vast output of South Carolina's premier man of letters

William Gilmore Simms was the best known and certainly the most accomplished writer of the mid-nineteenth-century South. His literary ascent began early, with his first book being published when he was nineteen years old and his reputation as a literary genius secured before he turned thirty. Over a career that spanned nearly forty-five years, he established himself as the American South's premier man of letters—an accomplished poet, novelist, short fiction writer, essayist, historian, dramatist, cultural journalist, biographer, and editor. In Reading William Gilmore Simms, Todd Hagstette has created an anthology of critical introductions to Simms's major publications, including those recently brought back into print by the University of South Carolina Press, offering the first ever primer compendium of the author's vast output.

Simms was a Renaissance man of American letters, lauded in his time by both popular audiences and literary icons alike. Yet the author's extensive output, which includes nearly eighty published volumes, can be a barrier to his study. To create a gateway to reading and studying Simms, Hagstette has assembled thirty-eight essays by twenty-four scholars to review fifty-five Simms works. Addressing all the author's major works, the essays provide introductory information and scholarly analysis of the most crucial features of Simms's literary achievement.

Arranged alphabetically by title for easy access, the book also features a topical index for more targeted inquiry into Simms's canon. Detailing the great variety and astonishing consistency of Simms's thought throughout his long career as well as examining his posthumous reconsideration, Reading William Gilmore Simms bridges the author's genius and readers' growing curiosity. The only work of its kind, this book provides an essential passport to the far-flung worlds of Simms's fecund imagination.


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Publié par
Date de parution 10 août 2017
Nombre de lectures 0
EAN13 9781611177732
Langue English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,3150€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Reading William Gilmore Simms
William Gilmore Simms Initiatives: Texts and Studies Series David Moltke-Hansen and Todd Hagstette, Series Editors
Reading
W ILLIAM G ILMORE S IMMS
Essays of Introduction to the Author s Canon

Edited by Todd Hagstette

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS
2017 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-772-5 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-773-2 (ebook)
Publication of this book is made possible in part by the generous support of the Watson-Brown Foundation, together with the Caroline McKissick Dial Publication Fund of the South Caroliniana Library and the University Libraries of the University of South Carolina.
C ONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
William Gilmore Simms: A Biographical Overview
DAVID MOLTKE-HANSEN
The Army Correspondence of Colonel John Laurens
JEFFERY J. ROGERS
Border Beagles: A Tale of Mississippi
JOHN D. MILLER
Carl Werner, an Imaginative Story; With Other Tales of Imagination
SAM LACKEY
The Cassique of Kiawah: A Colonial Romance
KEVIN COLLINS
Castle Dismal; or, The Bachelor s Christmas
JOHN M. MCCARDELL, JR., AND BRIAN K. FENNESSY
Confession; or, The Blind Heart
TODD HAGSTETTE
The Damsel of Darien
MICHAEL ODOM
Dramas: Norman Maurice; Michael Bonham ; and Benedict Arnold
ABIGAIL LUNDELIUS SMITH
Egeria; or, Voices of Thought and Counsel, for the Woods and Wayside
DAVID S. SHIELDS
The Golden Christmas: A Chronicle of St. John s, Berkeley
TODD HAGSTETTE
Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia
TODD HAGSTETTE
Helen Halsey; or, The Swamp State of Conelachita. A Tale of the Borders
JILLIAN WEBER
Historical and Political Poems: Monody, on the Death of Gen. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney; The Vision of Cortes, Cain, and Other Poems; The Tri-Color; Donna Florida. A Tale ; and Charleston and Her Satirists
JASON W. JOHNSON
History and Geography: The History of South Carolina from Its First European Discovery to Its Erection into a Republic and The Geography of South Carolina: Being a Companion to the History of that State
SEAN R. BUSICK
The Kentucky Tragedy Romances: Charlemont; or, The Pride of the Village and Beauchampe; or, The Kentucky Tragedy
TODD HAGSTETTE
The Library of American Books: Views and Reviews, First Second Series and The Wigwam and the Cabin
DAVID MOLTKE-HANSEN
The Life of Captain John Smith. The Founder of Virginia
CAREY M. ROBERTS
The Life of the Chevalier Bayard; The Good Knight, Sans peur et sans reproche
JEFFERY J. ROGERS
The Life of Francis Marion
STEVEN D. SMITH
The Lily and the Totem; or, The Huguenots in Florida
NICHOLAS G. MERIWETHER
Marie de Berniere: A Tale of the Crescent City
W. MATTHEW J. SIMMONS
Martin Faber, the Story of a Criminal; and Other Tales
TODD HAGSTETTE
Poems: Descriptive, Dramatic, Legendary and Contemplative
MATTHEW C. BRENNAN
The Remains of Maynard Davis Richardson, with a Memoir of His Life
JEFFERY J. ROGERS
The Revolutionary Romances: The Partisan;Mellichampe; The Scout; Katharine Walton; Woodcraft; The Forayers; Eutaw ; and Joscelyn
DAVID MOLTKE-HANSEN
Richard Hurdis: A Tale of Alabama
JOHN MILLER
Sack and Destruction of the City of Columbia, SC
NICHOLAS G. MERIWETHER
Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond
ALEXANDER MOORE
Simms s Poems: Areytos or Songs and Ballads of the South with Other Poems
JASON W. JOHNSON
Social and Political Prose: Slavery in America and Father Abbot
EHREN K. FOLEY
South-Carolina in the Revolutionary War
SEAN R. BUSICK
Southward Ho! A Spell of Sunshine
JILLIAN WEBER
The Spanish Romances: Pelayo and Count Julian
W. MATTHEW J. SIMMONS
A Supplement to the Plays of William Shakespeare
NAN MORRISON
Vasconselos: A Romance of the New World
KEVIN COLLINS
War Poetry of the South
COLEMAN HUTCHISON
Woodcraft; or, Hawks about the Dovecote
JAMES EVERETT KIBLER
The Yemassee: A Romance of Carolina
DAVID MOLTKE-HANSEN
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
P REFACE
William Gilmore Simms deserves his reputation as perhaps the best known and certainly the most accomplished writer of the mid-nineteenth-century South. Born in Charleston in 1806, he lived all of his life in South Carolina; he was no mere provincial, though. With lifelong connections in the publishing industries of New York and Philadelphia, multiple travels into the American western frontier, and encyclopedic knowledge of the nation s history, Simms earned the status of a literary citizen of the country as a whole, as well as of his region. His literary ascent began early, with his first book publication appearing when he was nineteen years old and his reputation as a literary genius secured before he turned thirty. Over a career that spanned nearly forty-five years, he established himself as the American South s premier man of letters-an accomplished poet, novelist, short fiction writer, essayist, historian, dramatist, cultural journalist, biographer, and editor. None was more prolific than he. Sadly, as the political separation of the country intensified in the course of the nineteenth century, Simms was forced more regularly to choose his allegiance, to America or to the South. The two were not as compatible as once imagined, and Simms the southerner won out. At the end of his life with his career and status tied securely to his region, Simms found himself on the losing side. When he died on a summer day in 1870, his literary reputation was already beginning its long decline.
Flash forward to a summer day in 2011 in the offices of the Simms Initiatives , the massive digital humanities project sponsored jointly by the Watson-Brown Foundation and the University of South Carolina Libraries and designed to promote and disseminate Simms s legacy and work. I sat in our office that afternoon listening to two prominent Simms scholars, David Moltke-Hansen and Jim Kibler, banter about the author s views on progress. At the risk of over-simplifying their positions, the former tended to see Simms as cautiously optimistic about society s ongoing development into newer forms of itself, whereas the latter saw the author as a traditionalist suspicious of progress. Moltke-Hansen at the time was the director of the Simms Initiatives , a post he would soon bequeath to me, and Kibler was the Simms Visiting Research Professor at the South Caroliniana Library that summer. The debate they were having was an old one-I had heard versions of it periodically throughout Kibler s residence at the library-one of the reasons for which was that both scholars were able to cite a vast amount of support from Simms s extensive published works. Seeking a temporary truce by taking a moment to marvel at the complexity of thought available in Simms s work, Kibler remarked that, really, before one could write on Simms with confidence, one had to read everything the author had written. Immediately, all three of us laughed.
It was not exactly that Kibler was trying to make a joke; he was at least half serious in his declaration. Rather, it was that the mere suggestion that any one person could (much less, would) ever read everything Simms wrote was somewhat preposterous. The collection is just too big. Even the most learned nineteenth-century and southern cultural scholars, even those who have read dozens of Simms works, have only scratched the surface of Simms s canon. Two of the most well-read Simms scholars on the planet were the ones having that summer argument, and even they cackled at the suggestion of reading all of his work.
To offer some context, the Simms Initiatives digital collection of the author s works, which features more or less all of his book publications, his scrapbooks, and some secondary material, contains nearly 45,000 pages by Simms. That would be an astounding number on its own, but even it does not represent the full collection of Simms s writing. The number, after all, only accounts for his book publishing and a portion of his manuscripts. Because of his lifelong involvement in the periodical industry of the nation, Simms is reckoned to have produced an amount of uncollected work in the pages of journals and newspapers at least equal to his book publishing throughout his life. In fact, Moltke-Hansen and Kibler agree that Simms wrote on average one poem and one review per week for every week of his working life, a span of over forty years. Add the fugitive periodical material to the books, throw in the unpublished manuscripts, and the page count becomes staggering. No wonder readers can find a sufficient array of perspectives in those pages to sustain a debate all summer long.
That volume of writing is impressive, certainly, but it also marks one of the single largest barriers to the study of William Gilmore Simms. To even dabble in his ideology is a rather significant commitment. Complicating things is the popular and critical disregard that Simms has suffered for most of his posthumous existence. An unfortunate fate for the man Edgar Allan Poe famously declared to be the nation s finest writer. The ebbing of Simms s reputation has received various explanations. Some argue it results from progressiv

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