Bøger af Bertram Wyatt-Brown

The Percys, one the most distinguished families in the South, are notable not only for their prominence in the political and economic development of the Mississippi Delta but also for their literary creativity. In The Literary Percys, noted historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown examines the role of gender and family history in the writings of this exceptional lineage. Few families in American can claim so many gifted writers as the Percys. The best-known among them are novelist Walker Percy, who died in 1990, and his cousin and guardian, William Alexander Percy, poet and author of the classic memoir Lanterns on the Levee. In researching the family's history, however, Wyatt-Brown discovered that Walker and Will were not the first in the family to take up the pen. In the nineteenth century, four Percy-related women--Eleanor Percy Ware Lee, Catherine Ann Ware Warfield, Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey, and Kate Ferguson--published a total of eighteen works, chiefly novels, but also books of poetry and a biography. Wyatt-Brown examines these achievements in the context of contemporary Delta society and in light of these writers' lives within a family of powerful planters and lawyers. Through these four women he also draws connections between the Percys' literary inclinations and the family's tendency toward melancholy--a disorder with which Walker Percy was burdened throughout his life. In the twentieth century, Wyatt-Brown observes, the male authors--Will and Walker Percy--reflected on the ravages of modern life using a wider range of forms, from philosophical essay to memoir to science fiction. Curiously, in composing Lancelot (1977) Walker Percy chose the gothic form that his collateral ancestors had sometimes adopted, and fashioned a plot and villainous hero bearing uncanny resemblances to those of a bestseller by Catherine Warfield, published more than one hundred years earlier. Finally, Wyatt-Brown explores Walker Percy's use of a purely male genre--namely, the mock-heroic--and how it reflected his personal and familial concerns. The Literary Percys uncovers an impressive family history and offers fascinating details about southern literary life.

Lewis Tappan (1788-1873), founder of the Journal of Commerce, is probably best known for his business accomplishments. His greatest achievement, however, was not finance but freedom. Bertram Wyatt-Brown demonstrates in this portrait, that Tappan contributed much more to the cause of liberty and equality than has yet been acknowledged.

Many scholars, according to Bertram Wyatt-Brown, have mistakenly attributed the coming of the Civil War solely to the slaveholding South's determination to retain black bondage as a means of economic and political advantage. That view, he maintains, too readily diminishes the ethical dynamics involved in the chasm between antebellum North and South. In Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners, Wyatt-Brown explores in a series of wide-ranging essays the ethical differences--epically with regard to honor, liberty, and slavery--that divided the two regions of the country. Slavery was, of course, the crucial issue in the conflict, but such moral concerns as honor and shame, conscience and guilt were inextricably a part of the dispute as well. Northerners, under abolitionist and antislavery guidance, came to regard slavery as a violation of American conscience and understandings of individuality, personal liberty and civic responsibility, whereas soothers adhered to an ethical scheme based on traditional concepts of honor. Wyatt-Brown suggests that to most southern whites the rubric of honor was much more than a matter of duels and political posturing. It was instead an integral part of the moral and cultural heritage of the region, affecting a variety of social relationships. Sometimes the dictates of honor were even more powerful than the Christian morality that nearly all Americans espoused. Using Stanley Elkins' antislavery interpretation as a point of departure, Wyatt-Brown devotes the first part of the book to the abolitionists' dynamic relationship to evangelical culture in which conscience, implanted in childhood, became the primary ethical code guiding reformers. In the most dramatic and probing chapter in this section, he shows how the violent "antinomian" John Brown capitalized on the tensions between Christian conscience and primal manhood to gratify his own and his fellow countrymen's desire for righteous glory, albeit for noble ends. The second half of the book reveals the contrasting ethical spirit of the South, as explained in W.J. Cash's Mind of the South. After placing the proslavery argument in the context of evangelical and, later, secular "modernity," Wyatt-Brown analyzes the ethical texture of secessionism in one of the book's most original and intriguing arguments. Differences over the meaning and applicability of honor and shame, he contends, played a major part in the South's struggle in 1860 and 1861 over secession and the North's response to it. Making abundant use of anthropological, sociological, and psychological insights, Bertram Wyatt-Brown offers here an interpretation of the causes of the Civil war that is both provocative and persuasive.

From Edgar Allan Poe's "dark forebodings" to Kate Chopin's lifelong struggle with sorrow and loss, depression has shadowed southern letters. This beautifully realised study explores the defining role of melancholy in southern literature from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth, when it evolved into modernist alienation.

In this culminating work of a long and distinguished career, historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown looks at the theme of honor-a subject on which he was the acknowledged expert-and places it in a broader historical and cultural context than ever before. Wyatt-Brown begins with the contention that honor cannot be understood without considering the role of humiliation, which not only sets victor apart from vanquished but drives the search for vindication that is integral to notions of honor. The American conception of honor is further deepened by issues of race. The author turns to the slave South to show how white and black concepts of honor differed from and contradicted each other, illuminating honor's elusive but powerful role in our society.He then goes on to explore these themes within a wide range of military and political contexts, from the Revolutionary War to Desert Storm, providing new insights on how honor drove decision making during many defining events in our history that continue to reverberate in the American mind.

Bertram Wyatt-Brown explores three major themes: the political aspects of the South's code of honour; the increasing prominence of Protestant faith in white southerners' lives; and the devastating impact of war; defeat; and an angry loss of confidence during the post-Civil War era.