From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature by Randall Fuller (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 163 pursue the kind of holiness he could understand. In [ostein Gaarder's Vita Brevis: A Letter to St. Augustine, Floria has read Augustine's Confessions and writes to say, "Youmust forgive me if I help you on one or two important points" that he left out. Another might be Graham Greene's Monsignor Quixote, or the Mary Magdalene of Michele Roberts' The Wild Girl. Even to list all the texts included in this reader would take more words than this review can be allotted (there are fifty-two in total), but it may help the reader to get a sense of them if I list the ten headings they are categorized into: Literary Theology; Fiction; Autobiography; Lyric, Poetry and Songs; Drama; Essays and Aphorism; Sermons; Post-Colonial Literature; Feminist Literature; and The Postmodern Text. I think it is fair to say, that along with the helpful introductions and afterword by Jasper and Smith, one definitely gets a sense of the imperative and potentially transformative power that Jasper looks to texts for. Both books can be heartily recommended for readers interested in intellectual and spiritual exploration. Eugene Webb University of Washington From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature. By Randall Fuller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0195342307. Pp. 272. $29.95. It has alwaysstruck me as rather odd that scholars of American literature of the nineteenth century have paid so little attention to the meaning and effects of the Civil War. Over the years, of course, a handful of crucial studies have shown how the Civil War shaped the literary achievements of the decades after Appomattox: books such as Daniel Aaron's The Unwritten War, or Patriotic Gore by Edmund Wilson, both of which are mentioned in the first sentence of this book by Randall Fuller. And certainly one can turn to the plethora of biographical works on single authors, ranging from Walt Whitman to Herman Melville to Emily Dickinson, that depict how the war influenced their careers: TheBetter Angel by Roy Morris, about Whitman's work in the hospitals, for instance; or The Civil War World of Herman Melville by Stanton Garner. And it's encouraging to recognize a growing interest in the war's legacy among today's emerging cohort of Americanists, including the author of this study. But given the centrality of the Civil War as the primal scene of American ideological belief and as a sort of "turning point" in American literary history (a major thesis of this volume), and given the sheer heft of historical work available covering every square inch of Civil War geography and related phenomena (not even mentioning the mind-numbing amounts of materials available on the most iconic figure of them all, Abraham Lincoln), thematic literary 164 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE scholarship focused on the War's effects on wide swaths of literary texts still seems disproportionately slight, considering its deep ramifications. Fuller's volume helps to fill in the gaping hole I've described: it is a solid introduction into the major writers of the nineteenth century who made the Civil War and its aftermath a topic of consideration in their works. Fuller sketches out how "a remarkable group of writers experienced that civil war;' and how they "struggled to make sense of the Civil War in old and new literary forms and to uphold their highest ideals.... [it is ] about how these writers came to realize, as would their culture, that upholding their beliefs had come at an enormously high price and that their faith in liberty and human rights had resulted in unprecedented death and misery. It is a story, ultimately, about how the war tested their deepest commitments" (8-9). Fuller's basic assertion, in other words, is that the Civil War marked a major turning point in the way many Americans viewed their own nation, and that nation's highest ideals, as in documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. As Lincoln so brilliantly argued in his central pronouncements, those concepts were indeed being put to the test. Similarly, the literary forms of the American Romantics and Transcendentalists were under siege by the hard realities of arms...