Question

How did the Civil War and slavery, and especially the literature of both, reflect the values of the American Dream? How did this literature change prior thinking about the American Dream?

I know the Civil War and Slavery showed that America was not the "Amazing place of Second Chances". Both of the kinds of literature showed the flaws in the American Dream, but it also showed that America would fight to make things right and keep freedom for all.

The writers of the Realism genre shaped and defined the American Dream by focusing on the great courage of those who sought the American Dream. How is this both similar and different from how Civil War-era writers shaped and defined the American Dream?
Im not sure about any of this one

Answer 1

Answer:Americans wrote, published, and read a great deal about the war as it was going on and in the years that immediately followed. This literature invested the violence and trauma of the Civil War with meaning.

Explanation:Drawing a firm line at 1865 may have had another effect as well: encouraging us to look away from literature on the war itself and on its immediate aftermath. The traditional American literary canon often skips from American Renaissance figures of the 1850s to late-century realists like Henry James and Edith Wharton. Yet Americans wrote, published, and read a great deal about the war as it was going on and in the years that immediately followed. Civil War literary culture included a wide variety of both popular and highbrow forms, from news of the frontlines to accounts of emancipation to patriotic songs and poems as well as countless works of fiction. This literature invested the violence and trauma of the Civil War with meaning. It helped Americans on both sides of the conflict make sense of the war and its effects.