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
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.)
"The Civil War Dead and American Modernity, as a rumination on the
nature of modern culture, is a critical commentary on the
strategies modern societies (the United States in particular) use
to forge a sense of self." -- Jae Tyler, Kent State University,
H-War
"In The Civil War Dead and American Modernity, Ian Finseth assesses
an extensive primary archive of photographs, paintings,
lithographs, diaries, news accounts, and textual representations of
the War that date from the War itself through our own recent
sesquicentennial commemorations. He scrupulously traces what the
archive shows us as well as its silences, presenting a powerful
account of how the very idea of the 'Civil War dead' has played,
and
continues to play, a central role in the national imaginary."
--Elizabeth Renker, Ohio State University
"Ambitious, theoretical, and moving, The Civil War Dead and
American Modernity transforms an ongoing historical and literary
conversation into a searching meditation. Exploring a range of
cultural productions, Ian Finseth shows how memoir, painting and
photography, historiography, and fiction render the dead into
impersonal abstraction and de-individualize the fallen. Selecting
an array of recognized and unknown nineteenth-century
soldier-memoirists,
visual artists, historians, and fiction writers, Finseth
demonstrates how these figures crafted memorial testaments and
shored up the ideology of national reunion. Accessible and
sophisticated, Finseth's book
offers a powerful meditation on the relation between war, death,
and public memory." --Julia Stern, Northwestern University
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