Literary Cultures of the Civil War ed. by Timothy Sweet

Abstract

Reviewed by: Literary Cultures of the Civil War ed. by Timothy Sweet John Casey Literary Cultures of the Civil War. Edited by Timothy Sweet. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0-8230-4960-2. 280 pp., cloth, $44.95. Timothy Sweet's collection of essays, Literary Cultures of the Civil War, carries on the tradition of reshaping the composition and analysis of the cannon of Civil War literature that was inaugurated in the 1990s and early 2000s by scholars such as Kathleen Diffley, Elizabeth Young, and Alice Fahs. Each section of the book either brings to the reader's attention a new body of writing that has previously been overlooked by those interested in the literature of the period or reframes our understanding of existing texts. The first group of essays examines Civil War–era African American authors and the literary culture they created. Thomas Wentworth Higginson's writings and [End Page 428] those of William Wells Brown are probably both fairly well known among Civil War scholars, but the interpretations Jeremy Wells and John Ernest give in their respective essays offer new insights into these texts. Less well known to most readers of Civil War literature are the letters written by African American soldiers that Christopher Hager examines in his essay; these show the important role military service played for African American males in creating literacy and with it a sense of civic identity. Hager also demonstrates that letters should be considered part of the literary culture of the war, as they reveal, particularly in the case of African Americans, the sources of literary techniques that would come to define later works of fiction. Faith Barrett's essay on the poems of George Moses Horton brings to light the works of an author not commonly discussed in studies of Civil War literature. Her essay serves as a useful bridge between parts of the book, as her analysis of Horton's status as an African American poet sets the stage for the discussion of poetry's role in the Civil War era that is examined in the next section. The essays of the book's second section focus on the neglected genre of poetry. Civil War literature has traditionally been judged by its novels. However, as these essays point out, poetry was actually the most commonly written genre during and immediately following the war. Timothy Sweet's piece on Herman Melville's Battle-Pieces and Samuel Graber's on Walt Whitman's war poems provide new readings of well-known poems. These readings situate them within the larger poetic production of the period and remind us that both authors were in fact writing war literature. Coleman Hutchison's essay provides a valuable window into a now nearly lost tradition of southern poetry that tried to articulate a nationalist vision for the Confederate states. His analysis of the anthology War Poetry of the South, which the well-known South Carolina author William Gilmore Simms, edited during the Civil War, outlines southern poets' attempt to explain the war to themselves and their readers and imagine a future for the South separate from the United States. The final section of the book emphasizes the literature of nation and regionalism. These essays use genres and texts regularly overlooked by scholars of Civil War literature to provide new insights into the commonly examined connection between fiction and communal identity during the war and in its aftermath. Particularly striking in this section are essays by James Berkey on the newspapers northern soldiers published during the war, Jane E. Schultz's study of Kate Cumming's hospital journal and the particular form of "Confederate Realism" that emerges from the pages of that work, and Jillian Spivey Caddell's analysis of the imagery of Andersonville in portrayals of postwar regionalism. These essays demonstrate the broad range of literary texts and themes that emerge when the cannon of Civil War literature is expanded to include genres other than the war novel. All of the essays in this collection provide useful insights for scholars of Civil War literature. Perhaps the greatest contribution of this work, however, is its insistence that scholarship on the literary cultures of the war...