The Civil War Dead and American Modernity offers a fundamental
rethinking of the cultural importance of the American Civil War
dead. Tracing their representational afterlife across a massive
array of historical, visual, and literary documents from 1861 to
1914, Ian Finseth maintains that the war dead played a central,
complex, and paradoxical role in how Americans experienced and
understood the modernization of the United States. From eyewitness
accounts of battle to photographs and paintings, and from
full-dress histories of the war to fictional narratives, Finseth
shows that the dead circulated through American cultural life in
ways that we have not fully appreciated, and that require an
expanded range of interpretive strategies to understand. While
individuals grieved and relinquished their own loved ones, the
collective Civil War dead, Finseth argues, came to form a kind of
symbolic currency that informed Americans' melancholic relationship
to their own past. Amid the turbulence of the postbellum era, as
the United States embarked decisively upon its technological,
geopolitical, and intellectual modernity, the dead provided an
illusion of coherence, intelligibility, and continuity in the
national self. At the same time, they seemed to represent a
traumatic break in history and the loss of a simpler world, and
their meanings could never be completely contained by the political
discourse that surrounded them. Reconstructing the formal,
rhetorical, and ideological strategies by which postwar American
society reimagined, and continues to reimagine, the Civil War dead,
Finseth also shows that a strain of critical thought was alert to
this dynamic from the very years of the war itself. The Civil War
Dead and American Modernity is at once a study of the politics of
mortality, the disintegration of American Victorianism, and the
role of visual and literary art in both forming and undermining
social consensus.
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