Haunted by the Civil War
Cultural Testimony in the Nineteenth-Century United States
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Product details:
- Publisher Princeton University Press
- Date of Publication 23 December 2025
- Number of Volumes Print PDF
- ISBN 9780691248578
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages232 pages
- Size 234x155 mm
- Language English
- Illustrations 18 b/w illus. 775
Categories
Long description:
How the legacy of the Civil War—as presented by writers, poets, and artists of the time—has shaped American visions of democracy
In Haunted by the Civil War, Shirley Samuels explores the work of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others to investigate the long cultural shadow of America’s cataclysmic sundering. Juxtaposing these texts with images—ranging from paintings by Winslow Homer to newspaper and magazine illustrations of political controversies—Samuels argues that the Civil War still haunts our attitudes toward democracy. The recent toppling of Confederate monuments, the continuing protests over racial and sexual discrimination, immigration, and Indigenous land rights: each of these forms part of the war’s legacy.
Examining the fraught deliberations about an ideal American democracy in the early republic, Samuels turns to the language of sensation in the poetry of Melville, Dickinson, and Whitman alongside Lincoln’s relation to the poetic and visual culture of his time. She considers the haunted afterlives of war in the work of Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe as well as in popular nineteenth-century inspirational fiction. And she investigates the literature of men at sea (and on rivers, enabling both connection and escape), as seen in Melville and Mark Twain, while examining women’s wartime work and experience, in writings by Gilman and Frances Harper.
Why does the Civil War still haunt us? To find the answer, Samuels identifies not only the ghosts that cannot rest but also the cultural practices that name them.
"[An] erudite, provocative book. . . . [Haunted by the Civil War] succeeds in its aim of showing how American life and culture, in the Nineteenth Century and beyond, remain 'haunted' by the ghosts of the Civil War and by the tension between democracy and slavery."---Robin Friedman, Emerging Civil War More
