US Civil War Print Culture and Popular Imagination

Abstract

Because the crisis of the Union was a crisis of representation, studies of the literature and culture of the US Civil War inevitably struggle with questions of inclusion and exclusion: whose view- points should be preserved among the victors and the vanquished? Who has the authority to speak, both in terms of the capacity to transmit experience and in terms of moral sanction? Should civilians be trusted to represent the experiences of combatants? Should pro- slavery views share the platform with abolitionist perspectives? How do we evaluate white representations, both Northern and Southern, of black experience? Where can we find authentic repre- sentations of African-American wartime experience? What do women have to say about the from the home front or the hospi- tals? What genres are best suited for the cultural tasks of making meaning and memory from chaotic events? Should nonfictional forms—personal narratives, letters, diaries, photographs—have a privileged place in testifying to the realities of war? What function do poetry and fiction serve in shaping and expressing wartime expe- rience and in postwar attempts at forging a usable past? If the real war did not or cannot make its way in(to) the books, as Walt Whitman suggests, then how can we convey at least a suggestion of the necessary shortcomings in representations of suffering, trauma, and loss (778)? The calculus of selecting and valuing Civil War-era texts is complicated by the fact that this deadliest of conflicts coincided with the rise of mass media and an outpouring of visual and verbal repre- sentations of wartime experience. Telegraph, steamship, and railroad enabled rapid transmission of news and widespread dissemination of ephemeral print materials throughout the North and, to a lesser degree, the South. The home front's hunger for unadulterated news and images from the battlefields blended with a fascination with as spectacle, fantasy, entertainment extravaganza: Herman Melville figured this unnerving interfusion in his poetic treatment of the pic- nic party in the May that attended the First Battle of Bull Run (59).