Civil War in Literature

8 reviews on how the Civil War influenced American literature

Posted on August 17, 2023 in Hot Topic

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Barrett, Faith. To fight aloud is very brave: American poetry and the Civil War. Massachusetts, 2012. 336p ISBN 9781558499621, $80.00; ISBN 9781558499638 pbk, $27.95.
Reviewed in CHOICE May 2013

Barrett (Lawrence Univ.) makes a significant point concerning the cultural necessity of poetry during the Civil War. In her assessment of the “power of poetry,” she artfully and clearly discusses the way poetry allowed individuals to “speak” to various groups collectively–family, local communities, and broader populations of the two opposing sides of the nation. Her overarching argument is that the connection between the Civil War and poetry forever transformed the way American poets addressed audiences and defined poets’ relationship to the nation: in her introduction, the author writes that “new modes of circulation worked to collapse both the boundaries between poetry and song and public-private boundaries, generating newly imaginable forms of community and a proliferation of new audiences in both the North and the South.” Springing from a wealth of orality in the tradition of “singing” and/or songs, poetry became a cohesive instrument in forging a collective understanding of a national culture. Poetry, writes Barrett, “became the central literary site for this exploration of the changing relationship between self and nation.” Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. —C. R. Bloss, Auburn University

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Fuller, Randall. From battlefields rising: how the Civil War transformed American literature. Oxford, 2011. 251p ISBN 0195342305, $29.95; ISBN 9780195342307, $29.95.
Reviewed in CHOICE August 2011

Beginning this book with a poignant metaphor of a volcano, Fuller demonstrates the influence and courage of writing before, during, and after the Civil War and the commitment of writers to understanding and changing the raging destructive forces dividing the US. He writes that “if this extraordinary group of men and women fanned the flames of national division, they were also wracked by a pained ambivalence about the … war.” These writers did more than “fan the flames,” however; they were convinced about the importance of a unified national sense of moral justice and unfailing in their support of that belief. This excellent book covers such significant writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, and the reclusive Emily Dickinson, to name only a few. Fuller writes elegantly of the period’s most influential writers, trying to understand the reasons why these great writers took various stances, “whether for the preservation of the Union or the emancipation of the slaves or for the simple dignity of human life.” Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. —C. R. Bloss, Auburn University

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A History of American Civil War literature, ed. by Coleman Hutchison. Cambridge, 2015. 357p bibl index ISBN 9781107109728, $89.99; ISBN 9781316435250 ebook, $72.00.
Reviewed in CHOICE October 2016

Hutchison (Univ. of Texas, Austin) has put together a landmark work in American studies—what the preface aptly calls “the first omnibus history of the literature of the American Civil War.” The collection comprises 22 essays distributed across three categories: contexts, genres, and figures. Essays explore current scholarly concerns, such as the nuances of cultural memory, and review significant subfields, e.g., southern studies. Among the many important contributions are Judie Newman’s examination of the transnational significance of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, T. Austin Graham’s analysis of Civil War historiography over time, Shirley Samuels’s look at Abraham Lincoln’s complexity, and Robert Levine’s meditation on Frederick Douglass’s changing views of Lincoln. Coleman made the crucial decision to stress the Civil War’s enduring legacy by including work on contemporary writers for whom the war loomed—or still looms—large. Daniel Cross Turner’s essay on Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (2006), for example, illustrates well how this bloodiest of US conflicts resonates powerfully in the present-day US. Both probing and accessible, Hutchison’s collection is indispensable to any serious study of the literature of the American Civil War. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. —G. E. Bender, SUNY Cortland

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Marrs, Cody. Nineteenth-century American literature and the long Civil War. Cambridge, 2015. 192p index (Cambridge studies in American literature and culture, 174) ISBN 9781107109834, $99.99; ISBN 9781316355572 ebook, $80.00.
Reviewed in CHOICE March 2016

Finding the antebellum and postbellum categories too limiting, Marrs (Univ. of Georgia) seeks to redefine the traditional borders of US literary study.  He argues for a “transbellum” approach to American literature, and makes his case by examining four writers who bridge and continually return to the Civil War period: Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson.  Marrs looks at how Whitman’s conception of US history and his attention to the labor problem—both influenced by Hegelian dialectics— transform the poet’s ongoing Leaves of Grass project.  He asserts that Douglass developed a philosophy of history that points to the war as one moment in a longer battle between slavery and freedom.  He argues that Melville’s poetry—often dismissed by critics as inferior to his prose—clusters around unresolved issues prompted by the war, raising questions about history, art, and violence.  Finally, Marrs claims that Dickinson addresses the war ahistorically and figuratively through erasure and blankness in her poems.  This slim but invaluable volume displays a thorough knowledge of literary and cultural criticism and how it has changed over time.  Marrs’s laser-sharp focus on these important writers will earn the respect of a broad range of readers. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. —J. W. Miller, Gonzaga University

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Marrs, Cody. Not even past: the stories we keep telling about the Civil War. Johns Hopkins, 2020. 240p bibl index ISBN 9781421436654, $28.00; ISBN 978142143666 ebook, $28.00.
Reviewed in CHOICE November 2020

This remarkable, timely, and readable scholarly book is unique in its content and breadth. Marrs (English, Univ. of Georgia) looks at how history and stories of the Civil War still resonate in contemporary culture and politics. Marrs’s aim is to help readers better understand the “primal stories” of the war told in novels, poetry, songs, sculpture, speeches, essays, paintings, plays, fables, and films, including Ken Burns’s nine-part documentary The Civil War (1990). As William Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun (1951), “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The US is still fighting these battles and taking sides. Marrs devotes chapters to the various ways the Civil War has been perceived and portrayed—e.g., as “family squabble,” as “dark and cruel war,” as “lost cause,” and as “great emancipation.” It is a story that the nation keeps telling and revising. Looking at evidence from the literary works of Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Emily Dickinson to the sociopolitical writings of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr., Marrs underscores both the truths and misconceptions engendered by what has been called the “crucible” and birth of the not so “united states.” Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. —L. L. Johnson, Lewis & Clark College

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Richards, Eliza. Battle lines: poetry and mass media in the U.S. Civil War. Pennsylvania, 2018 (c2019). 247p bibl index ISBN 9780812250695, $65.00; ISBN 9780812295580 ebook, contact publisher for price.
Reviewed in CHOICE September 2019

In the aptly titled Battle Lines (an allusion to the notion of poetry as figurative war), Richards (English and comparative literature, Univ. of North Carolina) looks at the central role that poetry played in how audiences came to understand the events and politics of the US Civil War in relatively real time. Approaching the subject by analyzing poetry on particular and easily identifiable themes—weather, seasons, memorial, battle, and survival—she discusses the dominance of verse over prose writing in the earliest days of mass media systems: poetry appeared regularly in national syndication through the “iron nerves” of the newspaper and telegraph and the “iron muscles” of the nascent national railways. Through deep analysis of exemplar poetry, most of which is reproduced in the volume, Richards reveals the efforts of poets to deliver to a feverishly curious American population various “evidently authentic” accounts of the war. This meticulous analysis and the accompanying citations and side notes invite readers to engage these accounts to better understand the myriad motivations driving poets in their efforts to chronicle, mythologize, memorialize, participate in (as “talking guns”), and critique a war happening in the foreground of one of the bloodiest, most contentious periods of US history. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. —N. D. Bowman, West Virginia University

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Warren, Craig A. Scars to prove it: the Civil War soldier and American fiction. Kent State, 2009. 223p ISBN 9781606350157 pbk, $34.95.
Reviewed in CHOICE April 2010

Warren (Pennsylvania State Univ., Erie) offers an honest, novel approach to fiction written about the Civil War, something no previous scholar has accomplished. He opens the book with a compelling statement: “When the first cannon sounded over Charleston … it announced the beginning of an American literary phenomenon.” Treating such works as Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, to name just two, the author creates a clear picture of Southern literature from modernism to postmodernism and in so doing fills a gap in literary studies. Marked by in-depth analysis and supported by numerous literary references, the book even includes a clever chapter on Gone with the Wind, that perennial Southern favorite. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. —C. R. Bloss, Georgia Gwinnett College

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“Words for the hour”: a new anthology of American Civil War poetry, ed. by Faith Barrett and Cristanne Miller. Massachusetts, 2005. 401p ISBN 155849510X, $80.00; ISBN 1558495096 pbk, $24.95.
Reviewed in CHOICE November 2006

This work is a redaction of a number of collections, some of them voluminous, of Civil War poetry. Many such collections date from the 19th century, so this edition is handy in offering leads to the chief repositories of this poetry. It provides updated and full biographical information about the poets. A time line that provides contextualizing details about the poems begins in 1820 with the Missouri Compromise, which is significant because a number of these poems date from the 1820s, carrying a major theme of the anthology: many decades before the actual start of formal hostilities, the entire culture was permeated with tension and thoughts of impending war. Obadiah Ethelbert Baker, who wrote more than 200 war poems, is represented here in appropriately truncated fashion, as are canonical poets Whitman and Melville. And the editors lean heavily on Shira Wolosky’s Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War (CH, Dec’84) to represent Dickinson as a profound war poet in a league with Whitman and Melville. All sides of the conflict are represented: the volume includes Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s transcriptions, which provide slaves’ and former slaves’ perspectives. Songs are part of the collection. Pictures, glossary, and extensive footnotes. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. —B. Adler, Valdosta State University

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