Arts & SciencesCollege of Arts & Sciences Department of English

Directory

Phil Beidler

Phil Beidler

Professor Emeritus

Education

  • PhD

Research Areas

  • Early American Literature
  • Late American Literature

Bio

Publications

Books

  • American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam  (Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 1982); reprint, with author’s preface, 2007.
  • Re-Writing America:  Vietnam Authors in Their Generation  (Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 1991).
  • Scriptures for a Generation:  What We Were Reading in the‘60s  (Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 1994).
  • The Good War’s Greatest Hits:  World War II and American Remembering  (Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 1998).
  • First Books:  The Printed Word and Cultural Formation in Early Alabama (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999).
  •  Late Thoughts on an Old War:  The Legacy of Vietnam.  (Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 2004);  reprint, 2007.
  • American Wars, American Peace:  Notes from a Son of the Empire.  (Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 2007).
  • The Victory Album:  Reflections on the Good Life After the Good War.  (Tuscaloosa:  University of Alabama Press, 2010).
  • La Isla Llamada el Paraiso/The Island Called Paradise:  Cuba in History, Literature, and the Arts. (Tuscaloosa:  University of Alabama Press, 2014).
  • Beautiful War: Studies in a Dreadful Fascination. Forthcoming from University of Alabama Press.

Editions

  • The Mythologizing of Mark Twain, with Sara D. Davis  (University:  University of Alabama Press, 1984).
  • The Art of Fiction in the Heart of Dixie:  An Anthology of Alabama Writers (University:  University of Alabama Press, 1986).
  • Company K, by William March (University:  University of Alabama Press, 1989).
  • Rachel’s Children, by Harriet Hassell (University:  University of Alabama Press, 1990).
  • Dog and Gun, by Johnson J. Hooper (University:  University of Alabama Press, 1992).
  • Gulf Stream, by Marie Stanley  (University:  University of Alabama Press, 1993).
  • Many Voices, Many Rooms:  A New Anthology of Alabama Writers (Tuscaloosa:  University of Alabama Press, 1997).
  • Writing Race Across the Atlantic World:  Medieval to Modern, with Gary Taylor (New York:  Palgrave Press, 2005).

Articles

  • “The Vietnam Novel:  An Overview, with a Brief Checklist of Vietnam War Narrative,” Southern Humanities Review, 12, 1 (Winter 1978), 44-55.
  • “Franklin’s and Crevecoeur’s ‘Literary’ Americans,” Early American Literature, 13, 1 (Spring 1978), 50-63.
  • “Billy Budd:  Melville’s Valedictory to Emerson,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 24, 4 (4thQuarter 1978), 215-228.
  • “Truth-Telling and Literary Values in the Vietnam Novel,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 78, 2 (Spring, 1979), 141-156.
  • “Realistic Style and the Problem of Context in The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It,” American Literature, 52, 1 (March 1980), 33-49.
  • “The ‘Author’ of Franklin’s Autobiography,” Early American Literature, 16, 3 (Winter 1981/82), 257-269.
  • “Raging Joys, Sublime Violations:  The Vietnam War in the Fiction of Chandler Brossard,” Review of Contemporary Fiction, 7, 1 (Spring 1987), 166-175.
  • “Alabama at Gettysburg,” Alabama Heritage, No. 10 (Fall 1988), 16-31.
  • “The Good Women of Saigon:  The Work of Cultural Revision in Gloria Emerson’s Winners and Losers and Frances Fitzgerald’s Fire in the Lake,” Genre, 21 (Winter 1988) 523-534.
  • “The Magical Realism of Mary Ward Brown,” Alabama English, 2, 1 (Spring 1990), 59-67.
  • “Re-Writing America:  Literature as Cultural Revision in the New Vietnam Fiction,” America Rediscovered:  Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War, ed. Owen W. Gilman, Jr., and Lorrie Smith (New York:  Garland, 1990), 3-9.
  • “The Red Badge of Courage:  Henry Fleming’s Courage in its Contexts,” CLIO, 20, 3 (Spring 1991), 235-251.
  • “Bad Business:  Vietnam in Recent Mass-Market Fiction,” College English, 54, 1 (January 1992), 64-75.
  • “’The first production of the kind, in the South’:  A Backwoods Literary Incognito and His Attempt at the Great American Novel,” Southern Literary Journal, 24, 2 (Spring 1992), 106-24.
  • “South Pacific and American Remembering; or, ‘Josh, We’re Going to Buy This Son of a Bitch!’,”  Journal of American Studies, 27, 2 (August 1994), 207-22.
  • “Remembering Wendell Willkie’s One World,” Canadian Review of American Studies, 24, 2 (Spring 1994), 87-104.
  • “The Story of Johnny Mack Brown,” Alabama Heritage, No. 38 (Fall 1995), 14-23.
  • “Just Like in the Movies:  Richard Nixon and Patton,” Georgia Review, 49, 2 (Fall 1995), 567-76.
  • “Mr. Roberts and American Remembering; or, Why Major Major Major Major Looks Like Henry Fonda,” Journal of American Studies, 30, 1 (April 1996), 45-64.
  • “Remembering The Best Years of Our Lives,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 72, 4 (Autumn 1996), 589-604.
  • “The Last Huey,” Mythosphere, 1, 1 (1998), 51-64.  Rpt. The Vietnam War and Postmodernity, ed. Michael Bibby (Amherst:  University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 3-16.
  • “Making a Production Out of It:  Victory at Sea and American Remembering,” Prospects, Vol. 22 (1997), 521-34.
  • “Satire in the Territories:  Literature and the Art of Political Payback in an Early Alabama Classic,” Southern Literary Journal, 30, 1 (Fall 1997), 1-12.
  • “The Good War and the Great SNAFU,” Georgia Review, 52, 1 (Spring 1998), 62-84.
  • “A.B. Meek’s Great American Epic Poem of 1855:  The Curious Career of The Red Eagle,” Mississippi Quarterly, 51, 3 (Spring 1998), 275-90.
  • “Situation Report:  American Writing about the Vietnam War” and “The Writings of the Vietnam War in the Classroom,” The Vietnam War:  Its History, Literature and Music (El Paso:  Texas Western Press, 1998), 154-63, 193-94.
  • “Ted Turner et al. at Gettysburg: or, Re-Enactors in the Attic,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 75, 3 (Summer 1999), 488-503.  Abstracted for Chronicle of Higher Education daily web supplement, July 14, 1999.
  • “Le Vietnam, tragedie americaine,” Magazine Litteraire, No. 378 (July-August 1999), 95-97.
  • “Solatium,”Michigan Quarterly Review, 40, 4 (Fall 2001), 703-712.  Rpt. Pushcart Prize XXVII (Wainscott, NY:  Pushcart Press, 2003), 142-51.
  • “Calley’s Ghost,”Virginia Quarterly Review, 79, 1 (Winter 2003), 30-50.   2003 Notable Essay in Best American Essays.
  • “Yankee Interloper and Native Son:  Carl Carmer and Clarence Cason,” Southern Cultures (Spring 2003), 18-35.
  • “The Lost Battalion of the Ia Drang.” Alabama Heritage  No. 68 (Spring 2003), 18-33.
  • “Portrait of the Historian as Literary Gentleman-Amateur,” Pickett’s History of Alabama (Montgomery:  River City Press, 2003), vi-xi.
  • “Viet Pulp,” War, Literature & the Arts, 14, 1&2 (2002), 246-59.
  • “Enlarging the Vietnam Canon:  Sigrid Nunez’s For Rouenna,” Michigan Quarterly Review (Fall 2004), 705-719.
  • “Mustapha Rub-a-Dub Keli Khan and Other Famous Early American Mahometans,” Writing Race Across the Atlantic World, Medieval to Modern (New York: Palgrave Press, 2005), 171-86.
  • “Caroline Lee Hentz’s Long Journey,”Alabama Heritage, No. 73 (Winter 2005), 24-31.
  • “Mythopoeic Justice:  Democracy and the Death of Edgar Allan Poe,” Midwest Quarterly, 46, 3 (Spring 2005), 252-67.
  • “Law Poems/Language Poems,” Legal Studies Forum, 29, 1 (2005), 35-38.
  • “What I Learned in the Green Machine,” Vietnam (October 2005), 58-62.
  • “Harry Toulmin and Henry Hitchcock:  Pioneering Jurists of the Alabama Frontier,” Alabama Heritage, No. 81 (Summer 2006), 18-25.
  • “King August:  August Wilson in His Time,” Michigan Quarterly Review, 45, 4 (Fall 2006), 575-97.
  • “Fort Morality,” Military History (December 2006), 56-61.
  • “Antidisestablishmentarianism,” Dalhousie Review, 87, 1 (Spring 2007), 25-42.
  • “MacArthur, Eisenhower, and the War of the Generals for the Mid-20th Century Presidency,” Military History (July/August 2007), 62-69.
  • “The Invisible ARVN,” War, Literature, and the Arts, 18, 1&2 (2007), 307-17.
  • “Ruby Pickens Tartt:  Citizen of the World,” with Elizabeth Buckalew, Alabama Heritage, No. 87 (Winter 2008), 20-27.
  • “Introduction” to Re-Writing America, rpt. Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 254 (Detroit: Gale, 2008), 181-87.
  • “Preface,” Nicole Willey, Creating a New Ideal of Masculinity for American Men:  the Achievement of Sentimental Women Novelists of the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Lewiston, NY:  Mellen, 2008), i-vii.
  • “China Magic,” Michigan Quarterly Review, 47, 2 (Spring 2008), 151-65.
  • “Re-Reading William Faulkner’s The Bear, On Salary.” Midwest Quarterly, 50, 2 (Winter 2009), 120-36.
  • “America’s Fairy Tale,” Fairy Tale Review (White Issue), 19-30.
  • “Thirty Years after the Fall of Saigon:  the Archaeologies,” Thirty Years After:  the Vietnam War in American Film and Literature, ed. Mark Heberle.  Cambridge, U.K.:  Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009, 10-27.
  • “Remembering On the Beach,” War, Literature & the Arts, 21 (2009), 370-82.
  • “What Kurt Vonnegut Saw in World War II that Made Him Insane,” Michigan Quarterly Review, 49, 1 (Winter 2010), 106-19.
  • “History and Memory in John Singer’s Sargent’s Great War Paintings,”Dalhousie Review. 90, 2 (Summer 2010), 185-97.
  • “Introduction,” Charles Coleman, Sergeant Back Again.  New York:  Harper & Row, 1980; rpt. PTSD Press, 2010.
  • “What Lady Butler Knew,” Military History, (August/September 2011), 58-63.
  • “The Two Ernestos,” Dalhousie Review, 91, 2 (Summer 2011), 205-309.
  • “The Photographers and the Living City/Los Fotografos y la Ciudad Viva,” text to photo-volume, Side by Sid/Lado a Lado, by Chip Cooper and Nestor Marti (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012).
  • “Testaments of Youth,” Critical Insights:  War, ed. Alex T. Vernon (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2012), 89-105.
  • “Mambises in Whiteface:  U.S. Representations of Revolutionary Freedom Fighters in the 1895-98 War of Cuban Independence. “ American Studies, 52, 2 (2013), 89-101.
  • “Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Long Journey out of War,” War, Literature and the Arts, 24 (2012), 1-13.
  • “Introduction,” Race and Displacement, ed. Maha Marouan and Merinda Simmons (Tuscaloosa:  University of Alabama Press, 2013), 1-6.
  • “The Great Party-Crasher:  Mrs. Dalloway, The Great Gatsby, and the Cultures of Great War Memory,” War, Literature and the Arts, 25 (2013), 1-12.
  • “In Search of the Great American Political Novel of  the Vietnam War,” forthcoming in The Political Novel, ed. Mark Levene, Salem Press.
  • “This Way to the Fuhrerbunker:  Gertrud Kolmar Strasse, Berlin, Mitte, 2012,” forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review