Apples and Ashes

Beautifully written and compellingly argued, this first literary history of the Confederacy displays its author’s extensive knowledge of book history, print culture, Civil War history, and political theory. Hutchison shows that there was a significant literary culture in the Confederate States, and he pushes us to think against the grain in taking account of that literature as a ‘national’ literature. One of his major contributions is to offer a new, more complex, and contingent way of thinking about U.S. literary nationalism. I am confident that Apples and Ashes will become a standard work in the field of nineteenth-century American literary/cultural studies.

* author of Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism *

Apples and Ashes impressively grapples with and argues for the significance of Confederate literary production, placing it in the context of an array of historical, literary and interdisciplinary conversations. Hutchison’s argument, that we should take seriously Confederate literature’s nationalist aspirations, positions its relevance to the interdisciplinary field of American Studies. Its focus on a completely understudied body of southern literature will make it of central importance to Southern studies and American literary studies.

* Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English, Vanderbilt University *

Forget the 'house divided' as the Civil War's familiar hallmark, even in the making of Confederate culture. Hutchison wisely supplements resisting Northern paradigms in print with a strategic embrace of European literary conventions. As a result, Apples and Ashes will be of keen interest to Civil War historians intrigued by literature's nation-building capacity, to literary critics impatient with the persistent gap between Melville and Twain, to transatlantic scholars newly roused by the war's transnational repercussions, and to globalists caught up in New Southern Studies across multiple disciplines.

* editor of To Live and Die: Collected Stories of the Civil War, 1861-1876 *

In addition to mounting a fresh and compelling inquiry into literary nationalism, Coleman Hutchison has written an excellent study of a people, time, and place judged by many, including some of the century’s most esteemed critics, to have produced no literature worth reading. Apples and Ashes makes a powerful case that the defeat of the Confederacy obscured the considerable merits of its literature.

* author of King's Dream: The Legacy of Martin Luther King’s "I Have a Dream" Speech *

Hutchison’s study of the literature of the Confederacy is unique, the first volume devoted exclusively to this subject. . . . Highly recommended.

Apples and Ashes convincingly demonstrates the fundamentally transnational nature of Confederate literary nationalism and, arguably, nationalism more generally. . . .No one can dismiss Confederate literature as uninteresting or unimportant after Apples and Ashes

* Southern Spaces *

With chapters addressing bookmaking, music, and memoir, Apples and Ashes is impressively researched and beautifully delivered.

* Southern Literary Review *

Coleman Hutchison’s Apples and Ashes is a welcome addition to the robust and ever-growing field of Confederate nationalism scholarship.

* Civil War Book Review