The Civil War Dead and American Modernity by Ian Finseth, and: Remembering World War I in America by Kimberly J. Licursi (review)

Between their separate remits, Finseth’s and Licursi’s studies span America’s cultural reception of the Civil War and World War I, ranging in the scope of their commentary from the 1860s to the 1940s. Coming from adjacent centuries, fought in very different ways, these conflicts are also distinguished by the disparity of cultural prestige they have garnered in American collective consciousness. While the Civil War may have amassed greater gravitas and attention, Finseth’s and Licursi’s works clarify that each conflict was caught up in the same evolving trajectory of American modernity, with its concomitant effects on the media employed to shape perceptions of warfare.

For Finseth, the Civil War dead “are endlessly reinscribed” through diverse and complex modes of commemoration, involving teleological assertions of national identity, increasing secularization, and awareness of the “essentially mediated character of all existence.” Licursi, meanwhile, discusses a range of print and film sources and contends that Americans never formed a cohesive ideological response to the war “as they would about World War II and the Civil War,” concluding that the war’s cultural reverberations were ultimately of an attenuated, nebulous form.

Each work investigates four vectors of memory. Finseth examines modernity’s influence on perceptions of the Civil War, before moving on to images, history, and fiction. He argues that individual subjective interpretation of the conflict parallels, in microcosm, larger cultural mediations, and offers Freudian melancholia as an analogy to understand profound, yet still unassimilated emotional attachment to the war. Finseth’s most compelling argument is in regard to Civil War photography. He challenges the scholarly truism that photographic verisimilitude shattered Victorian concepts of heroism and grieving, and demonstrates the paucity of documentary evidence which supports this widespread contention. For Finseth, the visual ubiquity of violence in American society from World War II onward has enhanced engagement with Civil War photography. In his reading, feelings of continuity with the Civil War are not only a legacy of the past but are retrospectively activated and strengthened by modern media.

Developing his ruminations on trauma and memory, Finseth suggests methodologies adopted by Civil War historians who either successfully narrativize grief (thereby neutralizing traumatic legacy) or, alternatively, built a new myth wherein the trauma of loss becomes the basis of new identity. Fiction, he contends, reflects the shift from romance, a genre fitted to antebellum strategies of meaning and the ideal of the individual’s sacrifice for the collective, to realism, a mode more suited to the modern, secular world, though one with less consolatory possibility. Discussing this broad evolution in relation to Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Edward Bellamy, John W. De Forest, and Ambrose Bierce, Finseth explores the ways they negotiate determinism, impersonal death, and traditional ideals of heroism.

Finseth, who has a long track record of high-quality publications in Civil War and American slave narratives, writes with assurance and confidently draws on an impressive array of critical and primary material. However, in its ambitious scope, The Civil War Dead and American Modernity feels at times diffuse and meditative. This is not helped by Finseth’s unremittingly dense register which is permeated with references to cultural philosophy. Maintaining such an approach for nearly 250 pages may be a matter of personal taste. However, there is a good deal of performative academic writing here, which even Finseth tacitly acknowledges with frequent phrases such as “by which I mean,” “in other words,” and “to be more explicit.” A less encumbered prose style could have been favored with no damage to—indeed, could only serve to amplify—Finseth’s otherwise engaging arguments.

In Remembering World War I in America, Licursi examines state histories, memoirs, fiction, and film. We learn that, despite concentrated effort by historical societies, of the 35 states who attempted to compile memorial...