Fateful Lightning

About this book

"The Fateful Lightning is the second volume of Diffley's trilogy on Civil War magazine fiction, called Making War Civil. Where her first book of the trilogy titled, Where My Heart is Turning Ever (UGA Press, 1992) charted the role of magazine fiction from the Northeast in "grounding the rites of citizenship" following the end of the Civil War, in Fateful Lightning, Diffley traces the sectional conflicts in a postwar nation, and how region shaped the political agendas of these post-war editorials. Diffley argues that the journals she looks at in this project present stories that give "unpredictable" results of sectional conflict and commemorate the Civil War differently from the Northeast publishing establishments. Diffley threads this through her analysis of four literary journals-the Baltimore's Southern Magazine, Charlotte's The Land We Love, Chicago's Lakeside Monthly, and San Francisco's Overland Monthly. Diffley uses a method of literary analysis that looks at not only on what is present in the text but through historically informed context, gleans cultural meanings from what the stories also "filter out." Coupling this literary analysis with city studies, Diffley's innovative approach demonstrate how these editorials offer, in her words, "varying gauges of continued political unrest, rising social opportunity, and dickering commemorative investments as Reconstruction began to unfold.""--