Ambrose Bierce's Civilians and Soldiers in Context: A Critical StudyAmbrose Bierce's In the Midst of Life, the second volume of The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, is hailed by critics and scholars alike as his most important literary work. In Ambrose Bierce's Civilians and Soldiers in Context: A Critical Study, Donald T. Blume refutes this and instead identifies Bierce's original 1892 collection as his most definitive and authoritative work. The two subsequent collections, appearing in 1898 and 1909, although containing subtle clues pointing back to the importance of the 1892 collection, are in their primary effect literary red herrings. This new study reveals that the nineteen stories that comprised the original Tales of Soldiers and Civilians consist of carefully developed and interrelated meanings and themes that can only be fully understood by examining the complex circumstances of their original productions. By considering each of the nineteen tales in the order in which they were first published and by drawing heavily on contemporary related materials, Blume re-creates much of the original milieu into which Bierce carefully placed his short stories. Blume systematically examines many of Bierce's editing flaws, exposing that Bierce's decisions often weakened the original literary merits of his stories. Ultimately this story reveals, tale by tale and layer by layer, that the nineteen stories included in Bierce's 1892 collection were masterpieces of fiction, destined to become classics. Historians and Civil War enthusiasts, as well as literary scholars, will welcome this new study. |
From inside the book
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... similar deaths in " One of the Missing , " " A Tough Tussle , " and " The Man and the Snake , " and , with slight variations , in the deaths of characters in several additional tales : " A Watcher by the Dead , " " The Suitable ...
... similar in sound , " and , foreshadowing the significant orthographic and grammatical " innova- tions " of Barney Bree , " No Sarvey , " which Bierce suggests is vaguely related to the Spanish phrase ¿ quién sabe ? ( who knows ...
... similar pronunciations of Scarry and Scary , has initiated the series of misapprehensions that lead Doman to rely on " fancy " for an explanation.17 In the final section of " A Holy Terror " any possibility that Scarry and Mary Matthews ...
... the narrator . Here again the setting of the poem anticipates that of the story , but the connections are as yet too ill defined to be very important , and the diction of the poem is merely vaguely similar to " AN INHABITANT OF CARCOSA " ...
... similar to passages found in the story . In effect , then , these definitions and images are simply part of the back- ground material Bierce had communicated to his regular audience by the time " An Inhabitant of Carcosa " appeared in ...
Contents
1 | |
34 | |
Killed at Resaca | 64 |
One of the Missing | 83 |
A Son of the Gods | 99 |
A Tough Tussle | 114 |
Chickamauga | 124 |
The Horseman in the Sky | 145 |
The Watcher by the Dead | 193 |
The Man and the Snake | 203 |
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge | 211 |
The Middle Toe of the Right Foot | 244 |
Haïta the Shepherd | 259 |
James Adderson Philosopher and Wit | 276 |
An Heiress from Redhorse | 302 |
The Boarded Window | 315 |
The Coup de Grâce | 161 |
The Suitable Surroundings | 179 |
The Affair at Coulters Notch | 185 |
The Collections | 329 |