Teaching the Literatures of the American Civil War ed. by Colleen Glenney Boggs (review)

Exploring the literature of the American Civil War remains as daunting as it is overwhelming. To prepare a volume that expands on various ways to teach students about the relationship between the war and the fictions that grew from it becomes more intimidating still. Faced with this task, Colleen Glenney Boggs has compiled a useful and insightful volume of essays in an effort to mitigate what she describes as the period's absence "from our scholarly and pedagogical approaches to American literary studies" (p. 1). Boggs helpfully divides the essays into four sections that address unique approaches to teaching aspects of the war, including works that discuss literature in the historical context of antebellum period and in the war's aftermath, approaches to various literary genres, and a last segment entitled "Teaching Materials." Larry J. Reynolds's essay covers how the antebellum works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson helped shape understandings of the origins of the war. Alison E. Carey's essay examines the seemingly noncanonical but culturally significant dime novels that common soldiers carried into camp and combat. Wiebke Omnus Klumpenhower, drawing on her experience teaching students in South Korea, helpfully provides a way for American readers to grapple with issues they may face while teaching international students. The essay by Darren T. Williamson, Shawn Jones, and William Steele reflects their interdisciplinary team-teaching approach, which involves taking students to actual battlefields as part of a course. It contains superb ideas for broadening student engagement with the war's complexities while potentially saving them the costs of covering the same breadth of material.

Catherine E. Saunders's essay examines the poetry of African American soldiers and helps shape the necessary Part 3, "Teaching Specific Topics." Contributions from Jessica DeSpain, Elizabeth Duquette, Matthew R. Davis, Michael Ziser, and Ian Finseth provide an almost literal center to the collection with their corporate and singular examinations of previously unheard voices. Saunders's essay in particular is well balanced by Faith Barrett's earlier examination of not simply "Reading the Civil War in Poetry," as Barrett puts it in her essay's subtitle, but to do so in conjunction with song. Finseth's contention that the "Civil War did not so much produce literary realism as provide a set of conditions in which a variety of writers (and visual artists) grappled with the meanings of large-scale bloodletting" provides solid grounding for extended discussions of a once-held maxim in American literary history (p. 124).

Boggs's collection has easily earned a place within pedagogical and scholarly realms. On a small note, if for no other reason than the ever-increasing number of volumes aimed at assisting teaching efforts, adding an essay or two on strictly literary concerns and perhaps including one fewer on how teaching a topic remains beyond even the best pedagogy might have enhanced the collection. Past that minor matter, Boggs has produced a superb collection that should become part of any university or personal library. Its relatively modest price makes such an acquisition possible.