Apples and Ashes deals the 1st literary heritage of the Civil battle South. The manufactured from broad archival study, it tells an expansive tale a couple of state suffering to jot down itself into life. accomplice literature used to be in intimate dialog with different modern literary cultures, in particular these of the U.S. and Britain. therefore, Coleman Hutchison argues, it has profound implications for our knowing of yank literary nationalism and the connection among literature and nationalism extra broadly.

Apples and Ashes is prepared by means of style, with each one bankruptcy utilizing a unmarried textual content or a small set of texts to limn a broader element of accomplice literary tradition. Hutchison discusses an understudied and numerous archive of literary texts together with the literary feedback of Edgar Allan Poe; southern responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; the novels of Augusta Jane Evans; accomplice renowned poetry; the de facto accomplice nationwide anthem, “Dixie”; and several other postwar southern memoirs. as well as emphasizing the centrality of slavery to the accomplice literary mind's eye, the publication additionally considers a chain of novel themes: the reprinting of ecu novels within the accomplice South, together with Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables; accomplice propaganda in Europe; and postwar accomplice emigration to Latin America.

In discussing literary feedback, fiction, poetry, renowned tune, and memoir, Apples and Ashes reminds us of accomplice literature’s once-great expectancies. sooner than their defeat and abjection—before apples became to ashes of their mouths—many Confederates idea they have been within the strategy of making a country and a countrywide literature that may endure.