Three writers who wrote against the backdrop of the Civil war
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American Literature after the Civil War
The devastation of the Civil War seriously challenged the faith in the power of sympathy, family, and God that undergirded sentimentalism as well as the romantic optimism that powered transcendentalism and the antebellum reform movements. These literary modes never really disappeared—Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), for example, drew on all three—but the rapid changes occurring in American life seemed to many to necessitate new forms of literary expression. Urbanization increased rapidly, as did immigration, Darwin’s theory of evolution shook up former certainties, and new technologies like the Transcontinental Railroad and the telephone altered how Americans connected with one another. In the place of sentimentalism and transcendentalism arose three related literary modes that dominated postbellum American fiction: realism, regionalism, and naturalism. The literary marketplace grew rapidly, allowing authorship to become a far more accessible career option than it had been, especially for African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, and women. In an era in which slavery had been abolished but the rights of African Americans remained tentative at best, new black voices rose to national recognition, as did new Native American voices, protesting the continued encroachment on native lands and new educational policies that sought to strip Native Americans of their cultural identities.
POETRY
The postbellum period saw the first publication of the poems of Emily Dickinson, a poet who, like Whitman, would fundamentally reshape American verse. Dickinson was little known in her own lifetime—only seven of her poems had been published, and these anonymously. (A more extensive collection of her poems appeared in 1890.) Her nearly 1800 surviving lyric poems frequently confront death, but she was also interested in nature, spirituality, and everyday life. Her poems are usually composed of alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, the meter of nursery rhymes and many hymns. But though she wrote in meter, Dickinson wasn’t afraid to break the rules, building in pauses through her extensive use of dashes, writing in fragments and enjambed lines, and repeatedly using slant rhyme.