Bertram Wyatt-Brown (NHC Fellow, 1989–90; 1998–99)

Fellowship Work Summary, 1998–99

Bertram Wyatt-Brown worked on two books: The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s-1880s (contract pending at the University of North Carolina Press), and Hearts of Darkness: Origins of Southern Literary Despair (under contract with Louisiana State University Press). His article "'When the Melancholy Fit Shall Fall': Modern Southern Writers and Despair," appeared in Psychohistory Review (fall 1998), and one on "Poe's Raven: Influence, Alienation and Art," appeared in the Center's journal Ideas (vol. 6, no. 1). His paper on "Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature and Modern Southern Writers," will appear in the volume Twelfth International Conference on Literature and Psychology, edited by Frederico Pereira (Lisbon: Instituto Superior de Psicologica Aplicada). He reviewed David Grimsted's American Mobbing, 1828-1861: Toward Civil War, for American Historical Review, Julie Roy Jeffrey's The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement, for the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, and Eugene D. Genovese's A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South, for the Journal of Southern Religion (all forthcoming). He gave a number of lectures including "Open, Restrict, or Be Sued? Issues of Privacy in the Papers of Walker Percy and Shelby Foote," for a meeting of the Society of American Archivists, in Orlando; "When Johnny Reb Came Marching Home: A Masculine Perspective," for the Southern Historical Association, in Birmingham; "When Johnny Came Marching Home," at Wofford College, and again as part of the Center's public lecture series; "Reaction to Rebel Defeat," "William Faulkner and Alcohol," "Post-Civil War Honor in the South," and "Confederate Common Soldiers: Motives and Performance," as the Franklin-Littleton Lectures, given at Auburn University; "When Johnny Reb and Billy Yank Came Marching Home," for an Organization of American Historians sponsored lecture at Central Washington University; and "Walker Percy: Life, Art, and Melancholy," and "Walker Percy and the Mock Heroic," for the Program in the Humanities and Human Values at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He served as a panel discussant on "The Two Souths: Southern Italy and Southern United States," at the Commonwealth Fund conference, held at University College in London, and as chair and commentator for the William H. Freehling session at the British and American Historians' conference at Myrtle Beach. He attended the Southern Intellectual History conference in Edgefield, S.C.; the Lucy Daniels Foundation conference on "D. W. Winnicott, Psychoanalysis and Creativity," held in Cary, N.C.; the meeting of the Board of Governors of the Historical Society, in Boston; and the annual meeting of the St. George Tucker Society (of which he is president), held at Washington and Lee University.