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The Civil War Dead and American Modernity offers a fundamental rethinking of the cultural importance of the American Civil War dead.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Section I. The "Ghastly Spectacle": Witnessing Civil War Death
- Chapter 1: The problem of experience
- Chapter 2: Sense, affect, representation
- Chapter 3: Faces, names, types, families
- Chapter 4: Melancholy reflections
- Section II. Body Images: The Civil War Dead in Visual Culture
- Chapter 1: Photography and the question of empathy
- Chapter 2: The illustrated dead
- Chapter 3: Lithography, history, allegory
- Chapter 4: Painting and the enigma of visibility
- Section III. Blood and Ink: Historicizing the Civil War Dead
- Chapter 1: Objectivity, partisanship, nationalism
- Chapter 2: The early years: Northern determinism
- Chapter 3: The early years: Southern alienation
- Chapter 4: Later years: The convergence
- Chapter 5: African American counterhistory
- Section IV. Plotting Mortality: The Civil War Dead and the Narrative Imaginatio
- Chapter 1: Modernity, disenchantment, and the agons of realism
- Chapter 2: "Grieve not so": Loss and the new woman
- Chapter 3: Narratives ajar: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and the refusal of closure
- Chapter 4: Farewell, sacrificial hero
- Chapter 5: The returning dead
- Epilogue
About the author
Ian Finseth is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of North Texas. His scholarly work focuses on the literary history of transatlantic slavery, abolitionism, and the American Civil War. Dr. Finseth was born in Boston, grew up in California, and earned degrees from UC Berkeley (B.A.), the University of Virginia (M.A.), and UNC-Chapel Hill (Ph.D.)
Summary
The Civil War Dead and American Modernity offers a fundamental rethinking of the cultural importance of the American Civil War dead.
