New Men: Reconstructing the Image of the Veteran in Late Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture

This intriguing exploration of the post-Civil War period through its fiction and nonfiction illuminates how the era spawned a new understanding of war veterans that lives on today. Scholars of the Civil War era have commonly assumed that veterans of the Union and Confederate armies effortlessly melted back into society and that they adjusted to the demands of peacetime with little or no difficulty. Yet the path these soldiers followed on the road to reintegration was far more tangled. This book unravels the narrative of veteran reentry into civilian life and exposes the growing gap between how former soldiers saw themselves and the representations of them created by late-nineteenth century American society. Organized chronologically and thematically, it coherently blends an analysis of a wide variety of fictional and nonfictional narratives. Writings are discussed in revelatory pairings that illustrate various aspects of veteran reintegration, with a chapter dedicated to literature describing the reintegration experiences of African Americans in the Union Army.