Southern Women Novelists and the Civil War: Trauma and Collective Memory in the American Literary Tradition since 1861

During and after the Civil War, southern women played a critical role in shaping the South's evolving collective memory by penning journals and diaries, historical accounts, memoirs, and literary interpretations of the war. While a few of these writings—most notably Mary Chesnut's diaries and Margaret Mitchell's novel, Gone with the Wind—have been studied in depth by numerous scholars, until now there has been no comprehensive examination of Civil War novels by southern women. This study explores works by fifteen such writers, illuminating the role that southern women played in fashioning cultural identity in the region.