Literary Cultures of the Civil War ed. by Timothy Sweet (review)

Two generations or so ago, Civil War–era historians would have been familiar with the works of scholars interested in Civil War literature. Robert Penn Warren, Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, Daniel Aaron, even Lewis P. Simpson popped up in many of our discipline's most significant monographs. And as insightful and trusted as those older readings of Melville and Whitman, Bierce and Crane, Chesnut and Grant have proven to be, the world of Civil War–era literary studies has moved on since the war's centennial. A lot. Yet historians, it seems, have not caught up. Instead, we continue to pay homage to literary scholars of the past. We do so at our peril.

The recent collection Literary Cultures of the Civil War, edited by Timothy Sweet, gives us a place to turn. In assembling twelve essays by established and emerging scholars of Civil War–era literature, Sweet showcases some of the best work that is now being done in the field. As he notes in the volume's introduction, the collection represents the priorities that animate this current generation of literary scholars. In so doing, Sweet usefully delineates older concerns. "While the centennial critics moved beyond the reconciliationist memory that shaped fiftieth-anniversary reflections," he writes, "they nevertheless looked for unanimity in the literary response to the war." Postcentennial critics "refused" this impulse to unify, turning instead to the "categories that wartime writers themselves had used to make sense of the war" (14). The essays collected in this volume, published at the war's sesquicentennial, continue the work begun a decade or so ago and reflect the interests of nineteenth-century literary studies more broadly. These include "recovery work and canon formation, especially in African American literature; a recognition of the importance of poetry in nineteenth-century American culture; continued interest in the print mediation of nation and region; and a renewed interest in aesthetics" (14). Many of these concerns connect with recent historiographical trends of the Civil War era, although perhaps not obviously, insistently, or immediately to the readers of this journal.

Yet the connections are there. Christopher Hager's essay on the epistolary culture of African American soldiers speaks directly to those historians working on the African American military experience. Because it explores the ways in which African American soldiers used letters to both document their loyalty to the Union and to claim their place in the polity as citizens, their letters reveal "a complex process of identity formation," one marked by "civic integration and political protest" (27). John Ernest turns to escaped slave and abolitionist William Wells Brown's postwar military history, The Negro in the American Rebellion: His Heroism and His Fidelity (1867), to argue a similar point. Brown used his history to counter "white supremacist culture's persistent misrepresentation of African American experience." In so doing, he strove "not only to record but to shape history." The "hyperdocumentary" text is messy, as Ernest readily acknowledges (59). But he gives us a way to see our way clear, pointing to Brown's skillful assertions that the war's purpose was much larger than most Civil War–era white Americans were willing to concede.

The essays on poetics of war also resonate with the work of Civil War historians, especially those who study nationalism. (Really.) Anyone who has read editorials in southern and northern periodicals knows literary nationalists of all stripes used the occasions of sectional conflict to call for literary sovereignty. Samuel Graber, for example, argues that Walt Whitman's claims for American literary independence took on a new sense of urgency during the war as "fresh evidence of British hostility to the American republic" was reported anxiously in the northern press. Whitman, Graber contends, referenced British hostility in his postwar poetry to "assuage the traumatic memory of sectional conflict" (122). He presents the war's veterans as "bound to one another" rather than to "transatlantic bloodlines" (123). The war, in Whitman...