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

The publication of an edited collection of essays such as Timothy Sweet's Literary Cultures of the Civil War testifies to the maturity of the scholarly field of literary study of the American Civil War. It also presents an exemplary model of how literary study can broaden and enhance our understanding of the people, objects, places, texts, and contexts that shaped and continue to shape the Civil War in American literature, culture, and popular imagination. The volume covers a range of subjects, from Sweet's formal analysis of Herman Melville's Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) in the context of vernacular poetic forms to essays on topics as diverse as William Gilmore Simms's War Poetry of the South (1866), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar (1868), the war poems of George Moses Horton, and soldier newspapers printed in the occupied South. While reading these essays, one gets the sense above all that Literary Cultures of the Civil War represents cutting-edge scholarship on innovative topics that pushes and challenges our understanding of what Civil War literature was, is, and means to different writers, editors, and critics.

As the title suggests, the book's critical introduction and twelve scholarly essays focus on "a diversity of literary cultures," which the editor defines as "ensembles of discourses, conventions, and practices shaping and shaped by verbal production," from the Civil War years through the end of Reconstruction (p. 2). Such a broad concept works to the collection's advantage, as it allows the editor to include essays that are remarkable in their diverse subject matter within literary scholarship on the Civil War. In contrast to some previous collections within this field, Sweet has compiled an anthology that focuses as much on canonical heavyweights such as Walt Whitman and Herman Melville as it does on newly recovered and anonymous writers. Even more refreshing is the balance that Literary Cultures of the Civil War strikes between northern, southern, and other less clearly defined vantage points—for example, regionalist writing and borderlands and transatlantic perspectives—departing from previous trends that heavily favored northern sources due to either editorial preference or accessibility of source material.

The volume opens with a summary of key stages in literary scholarship on the Civil War, from Fred Lewis Pattee's 1915 observations on Whitman's Drum-Taps (1865) through the centennial, postcentennial, and sesquicentennial periods in Civil War scholarship. The editor does an admirable job of surveying, contextualizing, and characterizing key works in this brief history of Civil War canon formation, and his critical introduction to the essay collection can easily stand alone as a clear and helpful overview of literary scholarship on the Civil War from its beginnings to the present. The twelve essays that follow explore a diverse set of texts and subjects from a variety of critical and methodological approaches, and the editor has conveniently grouped them into three thematic units: "African American Literary Cultures," "Poetics of War," and "Mediations of Nation and Region." The rationale behind this organizational choice is made explicit in the volume's introduction. As Sweet explains, these three thematic complexes continue the postcentennial critical focus on the body, nationhood, citizenship, and other issues as well as reflect "current priorities of nineteenth-century American literary study," most notably, recovery work and a heightened interest in the significance of poetry and the mediation of culture, nation, and region through print media (p. 14).

Literary Cultures of the Civil War accomplishes the rare feat of bringing together essays that all strike the reader as innovative, interesting, and important contributions to the dynamic field of Civil War literary studies. The collection distinguishes itself through an unusually high number of very strong essays, and readers familiar with the field will recognize that the book's contributors include many influential scholars who have advanced our knowledge and understanding of Civil War literature and cultural history. The anthology is [End Page 465...