The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861-1876(Print Culture in the South)

The Fateful Lightning is the second volume of Kathleen Diffley’s trilogy on Civil War magazine fiction. While her first book of the trilogy, Where My Heart Is Turning Ever, charted the role of magazine fiction from the Northeast in “grounding the rites of citizenship” following the end of the Civil War, The Fateful Lightning traces the sectional conflicts in a postwar nation and how region shaped the political agendas of these postwar editorials. Diffley argues that the journals she examines present stories that give unpredictable results of sectional conflict and commemorate the Civil War differently from the northeastern publishing establishments. She weaves this argument through her analysis of four literary journals: Baltimore’s Southern Magazine, Charlotte’s The Land We Love, Chicago’s Lakeside Monthly, and San Francisco’s Overland Monthly. Diffley uses a method of literary analysis that looks at what is not only present in the text but also present throughout its historically informed context, gleaning cultural meanings from what the stories also filter out. Coupling this literary analysis with city studies, Diffley’s innovative approach demonstrates how these editorials offer varying gauges of continued political unrest, rising social opportunity, and conflicting commemorative investments as Reconstruction began to unfold.

About the Author :
KATHLEEN DIFFLEY is professor emerita at the University of Iowa and director of the Civil War Caucus. She is the author of The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861-1876 (Georgia) and editor of Witness to Reconstruction: Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Postbellum South, 1873-1894.

Review :
The Fateful Lightning will be essential for any scholar of Civil War and Reconstruction literature or nineteenth-century American print culture. . . . It offers a valuable model for literary history, combining close and 'distant' reading with thorough historical contextualization. The cultural complexity presented here makes The Fateful Lightning a must-read for those who want to understand why war literature reflected regional place-making throughout the era of Reconstruction. It is beautifully written and strategically illustrated, providing nuanced readings of stories that readers will be thrilled to discover. The Fateful Lightning offers additional proof that the US Civil War produced some fascinating literary outpourings and demonstrates that periodicals outside of New England offered readers interesting visions and divergent narratives about the United States. It will appeal to anyone interested in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century, literary history, and commemoration. Diffley’s work continues to make vital contributions to our understanding of Civil War literature. By taking an enhanced look into the wider realm of Civil War- and Reconstruction Era-era historical scholarship, Diffley delves into how the nation's competing immediate wartime memories evolved before Reconstruction ended.