A History of American Civil War Literature ed. by Coleman Hutchison (review)

A History of American Civil War Literature consists of twenty-two essays written by different hands, and each of the essays has something to recommend it. Editor Coleman Hutchison has divided the essays into three groups, “Contexts,” “Genres,” and “Figures,” followed by an afterword. In the first group, Michael Winship’s “The American Book Trade and the Civil War” and Christopher Hanlon’s “The Transatlantic History of Civil War Literature” serve up fresh material on subjects not as familiar as those treated by neighboring essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe, the American Renaissance, and realism, though each of these neighbors has virtues, too. In the genres group, the not-so-predictable topics include periodical fiction, ably discussed by Kathleen Diffley, and children’s literature, deftly managed by James Marten, while other essays look fruitfully at poetry and song, diaries, memoirs, and narrative histories. The third group, devoted to individual figures, roll-calls many of the usuals—Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Mary Chesnut, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren—but concludes with a newcomer, Natasha Trethewey, whose volume Native Guard (2006) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2007. It is not easy to say new things about many of these giants, but—to cite just two worthy examples, and one could cite others—Shirley Samuels on Lincoln and John Burt on Warren do exactly that, and they do it well.

The volume is handsomely produced; each of the essays, with one exception, comes in at between twelve and seventeen pages, including endnotes, so that the rhythm of reading the whole suggests a series of short jogs or sprints, depending on a reader’s speed; there are six useful pages of recommendations for further reading at the end; and obvious mistakes—such as the identification of Eudora Welty’s story “The Burning” with the burning of Columbia, South Carolina, in February 1865, instead of the burning of Jackson, Mississippi, in July 1863—are rare. If Coleman Hutchison or his editors at Cambridge had let the sum of its parts speak for itself and given the volume a more modest title, such as A Companion to American Civil War Literature or New Perspectives on American Civil War Literature, this review could devote the rest of its space to more praise and celebration of individual essays.

But Hutchison insists that the whole of this book amounts to more than the sum of its admirable parts. Proclaiming priority, and inclusiveness, is important to him. In his preface he declares the book “the first omnibus history of the literature of the American Civil War.” (Likewise, the back cover announces that Hutchison is “the author of the first literary history of the Civil War South.”) Hutchison nods to and quickly dismisses well-known precursors, such as Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962), George M. Frederickson’s The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (1965), and Daniel Aaron’s The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (1973), asserting that whereas these books “give disproportionate attention to northern writers,” his own substantially beefs up “representation of southern literary cultures” (xviii).

But how different is Hutchison’s book? And how inclusive? Like Wilson’s Patriotic Gore, it begins with Harriet Beecher Stowe. If Hutchison wanted to stamp his history as not-so-northern right from the outset, he could have started with, say, William Gilmore Simms, who makes only a few brief, scattered appearances. Essays on the Bible or Sir Walter Scott in mid-nineteenth-century American literary imaginations also could have established wide-ranging pre-Stowe contexts. And how much more comparatively northern is Wilson’s Patriotic Gore, which firmly rejects all myths of northern moral superiority? Wilson devotes substantial space to writings by Kate Stone, Sarah Morgan, Richard Taylor, John S. Mosby, Robert E. Lee, William J. Grayson, George Fitzhugh, and Hilton R. Helper...