New USC Press Catalog

William Gilmore Simms is well-represented in the new catalog from the University of South Carolina Press.

Their list now contains eight books either by or about Simms:

The Poet's Holy Craft: William Gilmore Simms and Romantic Verse Tradition, by Matthew Brennan.

Selected Poems of William Gilmore Simms: Twentieth Anniversary Edition, edited by James Kibler.

Visions of Order in William Gilmore Simms: Southern Conservatism and the Other American Romance, by Masahiro Nakamura.

A City Laid Waste: The Capture, Sack, and Destruction of the City of Columbia, edited by David Aiken.

An Early and Strong Sympathy: The Indian Writings of William Gilmore Simms, edited by John Guilds and Charles Hudson.

The Golden Christmas: A Tale of Lowcountry Life, edited by David Aiken.

Tales of the South, edited by Mary Ann Wimsatt.

A Sober Desire for History: William Gilmore Simms as Historian, by Sean Busick.

CALL FOR PAPERS: 2010 William Gilmore Simms Society Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS:
William Gilmore Simms and the Crucible of Southern Culture
September 23-Sept. 25, 2010
University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC

Abstracts (150-500 words) are due June 25, 2010.

The University Libraries of the University of South Carolina and the William Gilmore Simms Society invite all interested scholars to a conference exploring the life and works of William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870), the antebellum South’s most prolific writer and one of its best-known public intellectuals as novelist, poet, critic, and historian.

The University of South Carolina welcomes academics from all disciplines, especially history, literature, philosophy, and political science, to contribute papers on any aspect of Simms’s life and work for this major national conference. While the conference will address Simms and his writing from all perspectives, one theme will focus on the comparatively neglected post-Civil War period, when Simms elected to stay in his war-torn native South Carolina, embracing the realities of defeat and Reconstruction. Those papers addressing the postwar writings will have the opportunity to be revised for inclusion in a university press publication. Papers addressing other aspects of Simms’s work will be considered for a volume of the Simms Review, a refereed journal published by the Simms Society, the conference cosponsor. A prize for the best student paper will be offered, which includes complimentary registration; to be considered, complete papers, not abstracts, must be submitted by June 25, 2010.

Please join us at the historic campus of the University of South Carolina for this gala three-day event, Sept. 23-Sept. 25, 2010. Abstracts (150-500 words) are due June 25, 2010. Send via e-mail, along with a brief (50-100 words) biography, to: Meriwetn@mailbox.sc.edu.

Please imbed the information in the e-mail, not via attachment. Direct questions to the same e-mail address. Conference registration is $145, or $75 to students who are presenting, and includes the opening reception, banquet, and program.

Updated website

Check out the updated (and MUCH improved!) William Gilmore Simms Society website:

http://www.westga.edu/~simms/

Simms and the Hunley

"Yet another show of deference . . . marked the funerals [of the H. L. Hunley's second crew] at Magnolia Cemetary. So that Horace [Hunley] and his crew might be buried in the same section of the graveyard, alongside one another, the Charleston novelist and historian William Gilmore Simms, an ardent supporter of the Confederacy, arranged to exchange a plot he owned in that part of Magnolia for another in a different area."

From Tom Chaffin, The H. L. Hunley: The Secret Hope of the Confederacy (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), p. 160.

Welcome

"Who, twenty years ago, of all the merely practical world, believed that a whisper could be conveyed from New York to New Orleans, in the space of three minutes, and on the wings of lightening. . . . It is now nearly twenty years, my friends, since I had the pleasure of making a visit to the studio of Professor Morse, under the guidance of a distinguished literary friend. Nobody then suspected his silent purpose of yoking electricity to the car of time."
--William Gilmore Simms

Welcome to the William Gilmore Simms Society's (WGSS) blog. The WGSS is the professional association for students of William Gilmore Simms (1806 - 1870). Simms's work as a poet, novelist, and historian place him in the first rank of nineteenth-century American men of letters.

We are, of course, aware of the irony of our endeavor---a blog devoted to a critic of excessive materialism and the cult of progress. Nevertheless, we hope to facilitate the study of Simms by using this site for posting news, research notes, notices of new books, and anything else that might be of interest to the community of Simms scholars.

More information on the WGSS can be found on our official website:
http://www.westga.edu/~simms/

Thanks for doing this, Sean ... onward into the cybermurk!