US Civil War Print Culture and Popular Imagination

The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865. By Alice Fahs. University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

To Live and Die: Collected Stories of the Civil War, 1861-1876. Edited by Kathleen Diffley. Duke University Press, 2002.

Because the crisis of the Union was a crisis of representation, studies of the literature and culture of the US Civil War inevitably struggle with questions of inclusion and exclusion: whose viewpoints should be preserved among the victors and the vanquished? Who has the authority to speak, both in terms of the capacity to transmit experience and in terms of moral sanction? Should civilians be trusted to represent the experiences of combatants? Should pro-slavery views share the platform with abolitionist perspectives? How do we evaluate white representations, both Northern and Southern, of black experience? Where can we find authentic representations of African-American wartime experience? What do women have to say about the war from the home front or the hospitals? What genres are best suited for the cultural tasks of making meaning and memory from chaotic events? Should nonfictional forms—personal narratives, letters, diaries, photographs—have a privileged place in testifying to the realities of war? What function do poetry and fiction serve in shaping and expressing wartime experience and in postwar attempts at forging a usable past? If the "real war" did not or cannot make its way "in[to] the books," as Walt Whitman suggests, then how can we convey at least a suggestion of the necessary shortcomings in representations of suffering, trauma, and loss (778)?

The calculus of selecting and valuing Civil War–era texts is complicated by the fact that this deadliest of conflicts coincided with the rise of mass media and an outpouring of visual and verbal representations of wartime experience. Telegraph, steamship, and railroad enabled rapid transmission of news and widespread dissemination of ephemeral print materials throughout the North and, to a lesser degree, the South. The home front's hunger for unadulterated news and images from the battlefields blended with a fascination with war as spectacle, fantasy, entertainment extravaganza: Herman Melville figured this unnerving interfusion in his poetic treatment of the "picnic party in the May" that attended the First Battle of Bull Run (59). Real and fantastic representations of war proliferated and mingled indiscriminately in the popular press. Sifting through and making sense of this vast array of materials to theorize relations between lived experience and imaginative act, and between Civil War print culture and the irretrievable events they shaped, expressed, and creatively interpreted, is an inexhaustible task with parameters that shift according to contemporary needs, interests, and desires. Alice Fahs and Kathleen Diffley make substantial contributions to a growing interest in Civil War media that is perhaps fueled by a desire to understand the prehistory of the present moment in which a US culture of war stands in a seamless, symbiotic relation to mass media forms that both claim to present the true picture and foreground how that picture is a product of a national imaginary with vested interests. While it is difficult to say whose interests shape today's media representations, Diffley and Fahs claim that, during the Civil War era, the imaginary was in the hands of the people, who generated a cultural symbolics of the war in mass media forms, waging what Fahs calls "a people's literary war" (311).

An earlier generation of scholars—Daniel Aaron and Edmund Wilson, most influentially—interpreted an array of Civil War–era texts with the aim of identifying or articulating a meaning-making narrative that offered a collective insight into the national tragedy. They did so, however, by resisting popular forms of expression, drawing on the insights of individual, gifted interpreters rather than anonymous, generic literary forms. In Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962), Wilson found the materials for his Civil War story in the "speeches and pamphlets, private letters and...