This chapter examines the origins and development of the “War Story” as a subgenre of American short fiction. It argues that the “War Story” evolved out of the Civil War and the subsequent flowering of realism, which influenced this subgenre both stylistically and philosophically. This chapter explores the major iterations of the “War Story” and documents its adaptation by writers such as Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and Tim O’Brien.

This chapter examines contemporary and emerging developments in the literatures of the Civil War and Reconstruction. It argues that two particular genres have recently taken root: stories about people previously overlooked by mainstream accounts of the era; and stories that approach the Civil War and Reconstruction as a source of philosophical meaning. The chapter explores the major iterations of these burgeoning genres and documents their ongoing evolution in texts such as George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, Kasi Lemmons’s Harriet, Gary Ross’s Free State of Jones, and James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird.

Throughout the last decade or so, scholars have revealed nineteenth-century American literature to be deeply embedded in ‘matter’ of one form or another. This scholarship goes by different names and uses different methods, but it tends to foreground the interpretive importance of literature's material dimensions, which encompass everything from paper and print production to animals, the environment and the economy. Such work differs notably from earlier analyses of literature's ‘contexts’, which the New Americanists tended to construe in a cultural sense to encompass a text's broader discursive milieu. Whether it focuses on objects, energy or empiricism itself, today's post-New Americanist scholarship places a more literal and pronounced emphasis on matter qua matter and the ways in which it conditions nineteenth-century writing.

This materialist scholarship has illuminated several aspects of nineteenthcentury American literature that had been either underemphasised or overlooked. It has demonstrated that many of the era's writers saw themselves as archivists and historians, actively seeking to record the world just as it slips away. It has also shown that many writers engaged with vitalism, physics and other methods of empirical inquiry; anticipated posthumanist insights into identity and the environment; and understood literature in terms of very specific genres, formats and media. I have learned a great deal from this work, but I think some caution is warranted. It is important to keep in mind that when it comes to literature, materiality and immateriality are inevitably entangled, and a great deal of what makes American literature what it is – what makes it distinctive and important – has to do with its immaterial qualities. It is certainly possible that, as Jonathan Senchyne aptly puts it, ‘many writers and readers … found meaning quite literally in the materiality of texts, in paper as well as on it’ (Senchyne 2020: ix). But it is difficult to square that account of literature's power with most writers’ actual motives and ambitions, or with the reception of works such as Moby-Dick, Uncle Tom's Cabin and Common Sense, which eclipse their material histories in spectacular ways. I also suspect it is difficult for many scholars to square that view of literature with their experiences in the classroom, or with their own experiences as readers.

Every era is momentous in its own way, but some eras are more momentous than others. Between 1851 and 1877, the USA underwent a Civil War of epic proportions, resulting in more than 750,000 deaths, the destruction of slavery, and the formation of a multiracial democracy. Yet these events merely hint at the multitude of changes that rocked American society in this period, affecting everything from the definition of citizenship to literacy rates and mourning rituals.1

Cody Marrs’s “The Civil War in African American Memory” considers the ways in which African American writers in the wake of emancipation tried to answer the question “How should one remember a revolution that was never allowed to complete itself?” During Reconstruction, Marrs argues, two forms of emancipationist memory emerged. On the one hand, many African Americans saw the Civil War as a historical rupture, a break that required commemoration; on the other hand, many saw it as a historical link, part of a longer and enduring struggle for liberation. Marrs retraces how these views of the war took shape in African American life-writings, periodicals, poems, and speeches that used emancipationist memory to reframe the world remade by the Abolition War. That tendency to turn back to the past to apprehend the present, he argues, is the defining feature of African American memory of the war during this period, and it is what ultimately ties these two commemorative modes together, revealing the war to be both an act and a process, an event as well as an ongoing struggle.