Correspondent Lines: Poetry, Journalism, and the U.S. Civil War

“Horned Perplexities”: Melville's “Donelson” and Media Environments

“…Regarding motifs in “Donelson” relevant to technology, discourse, and media, Faith Barrett finds tensions between union and division, oral and written discourses, popular and elite literature; David Devries and Hugh Egan identify “internal dialogues” and Bakhtinian heteroglossia throughout Battle‐Pieces (17); and Eliza Richards claims that the war and “media forms” changed “the way people think, write, and process information” (149) 2 . By further contextualizing these insights in the media environments of the nineteenth century, I want to ask why heteroglossia, normally associated with the novel, might arise in poetry at this time.…”