Books in Brief

Marrs, Cody. Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War. New York: Cambridge UP, 2015. xii + 192 pp.

Nearly one hundred years ago, a German historian charted a theory of cultural development that would eventually dictate the periodization of nineteenth-century American literature into antebellum and postbellum, a bifurcation that structures literary historical narratives, scholarly inquiry, academic positions, and curricula to this day. In Decline of the West (1918–1922), Oswald Spengler proposed an organic philosophy of history in which “‘a great soul awakens,’” flourishes, spreads its influence widely, and so creates “Culture.” Then, rather abruptly, Culture “‘mortifies, its blood congeals, and it becomes Civilization’” (qtd. on 15). Marrs shows the power of this master-narrative of efflorescence and withering, or rise and fall, for theories of nineteenth-century American literary development advanced first by Van Wyck Brooks, then by F. O. Matthiessen, then by all of us who have accepted the premise that the Civil War marks the end of a particularly vibrant literary era and the beginning of another, more prosaic one. Although Marrs overlooks how Romantic narratives of “before” and “after,” innocence and experience, arose in the nineteenth century itself, his eloquent, forthright challenge to the century’s reified period divisions is a welcome intervention. Unsettling the standard view of the Civil War years as something of an “antiperiod,” he reframes it as a “multilinear upheaval,” not a singular break but a “rupture with a stunning array of trajectories, genealogies, and afterlives” (3). What we need, he says, is a “transbellum” literature that aligns with period-spanning authorial careers and that recognizes how the war continued to haunt and shape literature long after it was over. In this sensitivity to historical continuities and to the war’s still-unplumbed effects on postbellum literature, Marrs’s book complements Martin Kevorkian’s Writing Beyond Prophecy: Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville After the American Renaissance (2013) and Martin Griffin’s Ashes of the Mind: War and Memory in Northern Literature, 1865–1900 (2009). Indeed, a fuller engagement with the concepts of memory and trauma, central to Ashes of the Mind, might have helped explicate the compulsive return to the war in the four authors at the heart of Marrs’s study: Whitman, Douglass, Melville, and Dickinson. The Melville chapter, which draws on the American Literature essay on Battle-Pieces for which Marrs won the Melville Society’s Hennig Cohen Prize in 2010, demonstrates how Battle-Pieces, Clarel, and Timoleon represent history as “violent cyclicality” (104), with human events playing out an endless sequence of destruction and renewal, in conflicts ranging from the internecine to the cosmic. For Melville, the Civil War was a proximate and especially poignant exemplum of this historical pattern. Marrs fills out this argument with captivating close readings of Melville’s poetic form. His literary analysis here, as in other chapters, gains persuasive force from his declared attention to authorial career, which grants an authoritative breadth of vision unavailable in more limited studies.

Mastroianni, Dominic. Politics and Skepticism in Antebellum Literature. New York: Cambridge UP, 2014. ix + 217 pp.

David Hume held that all claims to historical causality were fictive: that the forces leading from one event to the next will always be to some extent a mystery. Mastroianni argues that this idea resonates with the thinking of select nineteenth-century writers who, like Hume, see history as governed by “secret causes” and so resist the “epistemological optimism” of their moment, or the belief that one can truly apprehend reality, good or bad as it may be. Yet Mastroianni’s interest is not so much in these writers’ philosophical skepticism as in their exploration of the hidden emotions driving political and ethical action. Jacques Derrida and Emanuel Levinas serve as touchstones, insofar as they acknowledge the world’s opacity while emphasizing the isolation of human beings and their fundamental unknowability to one another. Levinas in particular helps Mastroianni mount the claim that the nineteenth-century writers of this study “contest epistemological optimism not on the basis of some nihilistic skepticism, but in the name of concrete and inescapable responsibility for others” (23). Though the premise of canonical writers as...