Patriotic Gore
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War is a 1962 book of historical and literary criticism written by Edmund Wilson. It consists of 16 chapters about the works and lives of almost 30 writers, including Ambrose Bierce, George Washington Cable, Mary Boykin Chesnut, Kate Chopin, John William De Forest (who, as American historian Henry Steele Commager put it, "surprisingly gets more space than any other writer, North or South"), Charlotte Forten, Ulysses Grant, Francis Grierson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hinton Rowan Helper, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Henry James, Sidney Lanier, Abraham Lincoln, John S. Mosby, Frederick Law Olmsted, Thomas Nelson Page, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Albion W. Tourgée, John Townsend Trowbridge, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman. In addition to De Forest, Wilson pays particular attention to Cable, Grant, Grierson, Holmes, and Stowe, choices considered "catholic and unexpected" at the time of its publication. The "patriotic gore" of the book's title was taken from Maryland's former (until 2021) pro-Confederate state song, "Maryland, My Maryland," "wrenched rather violently" from a line about the Baltimore riot of 1861.
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