The Civil War Dead and American Modernity by Ian Finseth (review)

Ian Finseth's The Civil War Dead and American Modernity is an apt academic complement to George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo (2017). The artfully constructed monograph analyzes the relationship of the Civil War dead to four "epistemic predicaments" fundamental to an American modernity that emerged in the wake of the war (21). The first chapter explores the increased sense of the mediated character of all experience, "the loss of a genuineness and authenticity in our relationship to the world," by examining journal entries, letters, and memoirs that describe direct personal encounters with Civil War corpses (75). The second chapter addresses the growing dominance of the image as medium of information through review of photographs, prints, and paintings that depict the dead. The third chapter takes up the declining faith in providential destiny and the rise of institutionalized academic professionalism in historical writing about the casualties of the war. The fourth chapter turns to deepened anxieties about "the essential unknowability, and therefore the potential unnarratability, of the world," as registered in fiction published from the 1860s to the 1890s concerned with the Civil War dead (196). In each of these contexts, Finseth traces tensions between ideological conscriptions of the dead for the varied purposes of the living and a "refractoriness" or "irreducibility to symbolic definition" by which the dead maintain their distinctness (15).

Finseth deftly curates the vast archive of this ambitious project. Particularly remarkable in that regard is the first chapter, which centers on close readings of a few passages selected, with impressive familiarity, from the writings of soldiers, nurses, and other witnesses. The chapter argues that the traumatic personal experience of facing the dead—an integration of sensory encounter, reflective feeling, and verbal expression—encapsulates dynamics paralleled in national and regional discourses. This emphasis on the connection between individual and collective memory returns the study of Civil War remembrance to a fruitful theme even for readers who would like to see more evidence before agreeing that "written, not to mention oral, accounts" of confronting the Civil War dead, when "distributed across the entire culture, formed the seedbed for how American society at large would symbolically appropriate the dead" (46).

The chapters on visual images, historical writing, and narrative fiction consider genres with more firmly established canons, and in each case Finseth combines fresh insights into familiar photographs by Alexander Gardner; chromolithographs by Louis Prang; paintings by Winslow Homer, histories by John William Draper, Edward Pollard, and Joseph T. Wilson; and novels by Augusta Jane Evans, John W. DeForest, and Frances E. W. Harper with invaluable excavation of little-known pictures, chronicles, and stories. As the first chapter's focus on individual experience provides a foundation for what follows, Finseth's attention in the final chapter to plot strategies serves as a capstone study of the entangled aesthetics of romance and realism and the space available for imagination of morally meaningful action amid late-nineteenth-century fascination with the forces of determinism and random chance. The chapter culminates in the chilling dissections of the sacrificial hero and mourning lover in Edward Bellamy's "An Echo of Antietam" (1889) and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's "The Oath of Allegiance" (1894), tales with provocative relationships to the necropolitical flag culture enforced by the Pledge of Allegiance.

The Civil War Dead and American Modernity foregrounds literary and cultural theory considerably more than most books reviewed in this journal. The index lists fourteen entries for Walter Benjamin, six for Fredric Jameson. The conceptual intricacy is not exclusively a result of Finseth's academic discipline. His central reliance on Sigmund Freud's classic "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917) parallels Daniel Sherman's deployment of that framework in The Construction of Memory in Interwar France (2001). But Finseth's commitment to theory is certainly part of his view of the relationship between his project and scholarship on Civil War death culture by Drew Faust, John Neff...