• American Studies
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• v.44 no.1
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• pp.113-135
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• 2021

The Civil War is widely accepted as the single most meaningful event in American history that overcame the most fatal crisis of internal division of the nation with much success. That meaningfulness in turn glorifies the North's triumph over the South and justifies hierarchical differences between the two. Yet, as shown in the studies of Civil War literature, such glorification and justification relies too much on the North-centered historical paradigm. This essay aims to offer a way of rectifying it by examining a short story by one of the persistently obscured writers of the period: Elizabeth Stoddard. The essay follows the cue of Alice Fahs's cultural-studies methodology of using popular wartime periodicals as the main resource of the war literature, and reads Stoddard's "Sally's Choice" as one of the examples that expose the hegemonic bias inside the North-directed discourse of the time. This essay is expected to demonstrate the necessity of expanding and deepening our conception of 'literature,' 'the Civil War,' and 'Civil War literature' in an ever-flexible and ever-changeable manner.