Wounded Hearts: Masculinity, Law, and Literature in American Culture

In the aftermath of the Civil War, however, with many soldiers suffering from new kinds of inexplicable emotional wounds, new psychological, cultural, and legal discourses arose that specifically concerned emotional injury, and literate, professional, middle-class men used these discourses to their advantages. [...] in chapter one, Travis astutely reads the sentimentalism of much Civil War writing by the soldiers themselves and by the women authors of the period, like Harriet Beecher Stowe, as a way of setting up her analysis of how literary men in the age of realism responded both to the perplexing psychic wounds of these soldiers and the sentimentalism of the literary culture.