Abstract:

In antebellum America, political discourse provided the legal framework for the country, but it was the stories that myth-makers on both Northern and Southern sides of the conflict told that provided the context for a public desperate for mythic validation of their way of life. Preston Brooks' assault of Charles Sumner on the floor of Congress in 1856, for instance, was in reality an isolated example of one man maliciously insulting another's family and then suffering from the outrageous and criminal response from him, but when they were both cast in stories as heroes who embodied the most cherished values of their respective regions, the incident took on a ludicrously important cultural significance as a marker for why one region's mythic codes were superior to the other's. America's national crisis was thus a narrative crisis as much as it was a political crisis, as competing versions of America's Revolutionary mythology grounded the conflict as one of belief and not just political difference.

That Abraham Lincoln's version of this mythology was the one that crystallized within the crucible of a national apocalypse and so became the foundation for modern American culture is certainly a function of cosmic circumstances, but it is also a function of Lincoln's matured literary genius. America's modern political culture begins with Lincoln--that much has rarely been in dispute since his death. But modern American literature also begins with Lincoln. Lincoln was the first poet laureate of the Union, and, more to the point, he was the most influential poet America has ever produced as regards the subsequent efforts to write a national literature. Every Unionist thinker and writer who came after Lincoln has been forced to deal with the enormous shadow of his letters if they wish to be taken seriously as contributors to the national mythos, and those who argue for a revision of the national culture have generally argued out of his mythology rather than in opposition to it.

My study is, accordingly, about the literature of Lincoln, and about its influence in shaping the literature of his far more canonical successors. It analyzes the genesis of the new American meta-narrative, that is, and then traces the "grand descent" of Lincolnian rhetoric in writers who presumed to speak as "national" writers. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)