1988 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
The Civil War and America's Literary Currents
Project/Area Number |
62510256
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Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for General Scientific Research (C)
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Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
Research Field |
英語・英文学(アメリカ語・アメリカ文学)
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Research Institution | Meiji University |
Principal Investigator |
MAKINO Aricmichi Department of Literature, 文学部文学科, 教授 (20092471)
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Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
HAYASHI Yoshikatsu Department of Literature, 文学部史学科, 助教授 (10164972)
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Project Period (FY) |
1987 – 1988
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Keywords | federalism / defense of slavery / Battle of Manassas / Battle of Gettysburg / fall of Atlanta fall of Richmond / unwritten war |
Research Abstract |
We have examined the project under the title of "the Civil War and America's Literary Currents" and acquired the following achievements. (1) Herman Melville was an novelist who continued to point out in his literary works that the Civil War was inevitable. Makino analyzed Melville's masterpiece Moby Dick from historical and ideological viewpoints and produced a forty-page article written in English. This paper will be published in 1989 in the United States. (2) Makino also exmained processes how Melville deepened his understanding about slavery and paradoxical meanings of the war itself particularly through Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) as well as Mardi (1849), Benito Cereno (1855), and Clarel (1876). Makino is going to make a presentation on these subjects under the title of "The Civil War and American Novelists with Focus on Melville," which will be published in English in Sky-Hawk in 1989. (3) Hayashi published "Mr. & Mrs. Davidson and the Civil War" on Magnolia in 1988. This article focused on a confederate soldier who was engaged in major battles and kept sending letters to his wife who was left with her family in the home front. By analyzing the letters home, the author made clear a soldier's viewpoint about the war and how the war affected the daily life of the ordinary people. (4) Faulkner is a novelist who was born in the south and inherited legacies from the Civil War and placed them in the ceter of his literary imagination. Makino translated Faulkner's Early Works into Japanese and will be publishing the translation as the first volume of Faulkner Collective Works in Japan. (5) Makino also analyzed relationship between literatis and social conditions in America during World War I and II and produced an article respectively about the subject in hopes to examine impacts of America's wars on literatis in the broader perspective.
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