Memory and Myth is an interdisciplinary study of the Civil War and its enduring impact on American writers and filmmakers. Its twenty-five chapters are all concerned, in one way or another, with creative responses to the Civil War, and the ways in which artists have sought to make sense of the war and to convey their findings to succeeding generations of readers and filmgoers. The book also examines the role of movies and television in transmuting the historical memories of the Civil War into durable, ever-changing myths.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"This inherited misfortune" : gender, race, and slavery in Uncle Tom's cabin and Gone with the wing / William E. Huntzicker -- Beyond Uncle Tom's cabin / Lloyd Chiasson -- The terror of Poe : slavery, the southern gentleman, and the status quo / Eve Dunbar -- John Brown : the many faces of a nineteenth-century martyr / Bernell E. Tripp -- The fugitive imagination : Robert Penn Warren's John Brown / Robert Blakeslee Gilpin -- The search for community and justice : Robert Penn Warren, race relations, and the Civil War / Edward J. Blum, Sarah Hardin Blum -- Between fiction and fact : Ben Wood, Fort Lafayette, and Civil War America / Menahem Blondheim -- William Gilmore Simms : a literary casualty of the Civil War / Phebe Davidson, Debra Reddin van Tuyll -- Henry Adam's Civil War : despair and Democracy / W. Scott Poole -- "So many, many needless dead": the Civil War witness of Ambrose Bierce / Roy Morris -- Of saints and sinners: religion and the Civil War and reconstruction novel / Edward J. Blum -- On whose responsibility? : the historical and literary underpinnings of The red badge of courage / Roy Morris -- A muckraker and Manassas : Upton Sinclair's Civil War fiction / Jessica A. Dorman -- Narrative art and modernist sensibility in the Civil War fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald / Marcia Noe, Fendall Fulton -- "Let the story tellers invent it all" : Col. John S. Mosby in popular literature / Paul Ashdown, Edward Caudill -- Tap roots and the free state of Jones / Nancy Dupont -- "Savage satori" : fact and fiction in Charles Frazier's Cold mountain / Paul Ashdown -- "History with lightning" : the legacy of D.W. Griffith's The birth of a nation / Phebe Davidson -- Hollywood themes and southern myths : an analysis of Gone with the wing / William E. Huntzicker -- Knights in blue and butternut: television's Civil War / Paul Ashdown -- History thrice removed : Joshua Chamberlain and Gettysburg / Crompton Burton -- "Ain't nobody clean" : Glory! and the politics of black agency / W. Scott Poole -- Alex Haley's Roots : the fiction of fact / William E. Huntzicker -- A voice of the south : the transformation of Shelby Foote / David W. Bulla.