Description
Originally published in 1876 as The Woman in Battle, this Civil War narrative offers Velazquez’s seemingly inconceivable autobiographical account, in addition to a new critical introduction and glossary by Jesse Alemán. Scholars are divided between those who read the book as a most often honest autobiography and those who read it as mostly fiction. According to Alemán’s critical introduction, the book also reads as pulp fiction, spy memoir, seduction narrative, go back and forth literature, and historical account, at the same time as it mirrors the literary conventions of other first-person female accounts of cross-dressing published in the USA right through wartime, dating back to the Revolutionary War. Whatever the facts are, this is an authentic Civil War narrative, Alemán concludes, that recounts how war disrupts normal gender roles, redefines national borders, and challenges the definition of identity.