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From Battlefields Rising: How The Civil War Transformed American Literature
When Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in April of 1861, Walt Whitman declared it "the volcanic upheaval of the nation"--the bloody inception of a war that would dramatically alter the shape and character of American culture along with its political, racial, and social landscape. Prior
to the war, America's leading writers had been integral to helping the young nation imagine itself, assert its beliefs, and realize its immense potential. When the Civil War erupted, it forced them to witness not only unimaginable human carnage on the battlefield, but also the disintegration of the
foundational symbolic order they had helped to create. The war demanded new frameworks for understanding the world and new forms of communication that could engage with the immensity of the conflict. It fostered both social and cultural experimentation.
Now available in paperback, From Battlefields Rising explores the profound impact of the war on writers including Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass. As the writers of the time grappled with the war's impact on the
individual and the national psyche, their responses multiplied and transmuted. Whitman's poetry and prose, for example, was chastened and deepened by his years spent ministering to wounded soldiers; off the battlefield, the anguish of war would come to suffuse the austere, elliptical poems that
Emily Dickinson was writing from afar; and Hawthorne was rendered silent by his reading of military reports and talks with soldiers. Calling into question every prior presumption and ideal, the war forever changed America's early idealism-and consequently its literature-into something far more
ambivalent and raw.
An absorbing group portrait of the period's most important writers, From Battlefields Rising flashes with forgotten historical details and elegant new ideas. It alters previous perceptions about the evolution of American literature and how Americans have understood and expressed their common
history.
to the war, America's leading writers had been integral to helping the young nation imagine itself, assert its beliefs, and realize its immense potential. When the Civil War erupted, it forced them to witness not only unimaginable human carnage on the battlefield, but also the disintegration of the
foundational symbolic order they had helped to create. The war demanded new frameworks for understanding the world and new forms of communication that could engage with the immensity of the conflict. It fostered both social and cultural experimentation.
Now available in paperback, From Battlefields Rising explores the profound impact of the war on writers including Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass. As the writers of the time grappled with the war's impact on the
individual and the national psyche, their responses multiplied and transmuted. Whitman's poetry and prose, for example, was chastened and deepened by his years spent ministering to wounded soldiers; off the battlefield, the anguish of war would come to suffuse the austere, elliptical poems that
Emily Dickinson was writing from afar; and Hawthorne was rendered silent by his reading of military reports and talks with soldiers. Calling into question every prior presumption and ideal, the war forever changed America's early idealism-and consequently its literature-into something far more
ambivalent and raw.
An absorbing group portrait of the period's most important writers, From Battlefields Rising flashes with forgotten historical details and elegant new ideas. It alters previous perceptions about the evolution of American literature and how Americans have understood and expressed their common
history.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published December 13, 2010
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71 people want to read
About the author
Randall Fuller
8 books18 followersRandall Fuller is the author of From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature, which won the Phi Beta Kappa’s Christian Gauss Award for best literary criticism, and Emerson’s Ghosts: Literature, Politics, and the Making of Americanists. He has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is the Chapman Professor of English at the University of Tulsa.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
June 3, 2015
Review title: Warning from our Truth in Titling department: misleading subtitle
From the subtitle of this book, I was expecting a broad-scope discussion of how American literature before and after the American Civil War was changed. In fact the focus and appeal of this book is much narrower:
* Time: The focus is actually on how American literature was transformed during the years the Civil War was progressing, not afterward. This was a major disappointment to me, because the period after the Civil War through World War one saw a major flowering of American literature, science, thought, and culture, and I expected this book to give some insight into the fertilization the Civil War provided to that bloom. Not here.
* Space: the focus here is just on a very small set of writers active before and during the war: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. These are all New Englanders, and essentially represent the Transcendentalist abolitionist movement--all fine writers from a great literary and political tradition, but hardly one which justifies the appelation "American Literature" applied in the subtitle. There was then and remains still a certain amount of arrogance and assumption that the war and its aims was selected, defined, approved, and won by them; this arrogance and assumption is resented and hated by many outside their geographical, religious, and political clic; the misleading subtitle of this book doesn't help.
Within that context, if you are seeking a well-studied analysis of how the writing of the New England Transcendentalists was changed during the years of 1861 to 1865, this book is for you and you will rate it higher than I have here. For the rest, it will have only passing interest.
From the subtitle of this book, I was expecting a broad-scope discussion of how American literature before and after the American Civil War was changed. In fact the focus and appeal of this book is much narrower:
* Time: The focus is actually on how American literature was transformed during the years the Civil War was progressing, not afterward. This was a major disappointment to me, because the period after the Civil War through World War one saw a major flowering of American literature, science, thought, and culture, and I expected this book to give some insight into the fertilization the Civil War provided to that bloom. Not here.
* Space: the focus here is just on a very small set of writers active before and during the war: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. These are all New Englanders, and essentially represent the Transcendentalist abolitionist movement--all fine writers from a great literary and political tradition, but hardly one which justifies the appelation "American Literature" applied in the subtitle. There was then and remains still a certain amount of arrogance and assumption that the war and its aims was selected, defined, approved, and won by them; this arrogance and assumption is resented and hated by many outside their geographical, religious, and political clic; the misleading subtitle of this book doesn't help.
Within that context, if you are seeking a well-studied analysis of how the writing of the New England Transcendentalists was changed during the years of 1861 to 1865, this book is for you and you will rate it higher than I have here. For the rest, it will have only passing interest.
December 23, 2024
If you like mid-19th century literature, as I do, you will like this book. Plus, although it’s not a lengthy volume, there’s quite a bit about the civil war itself.
March 23, 2011
An interesting book on the emergence of Northern writers who would influence generations of Americans, including Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson and Ralph Waldo Emerson. It discusses the build-up to war and the strong alliance that all had with abolitionists. Then, as the war progressed, the optimism of the New England Transcendentalists gave way to the realities and the depression of seeing an entire generation of men destroyed or damaged by the war.
What is missing from this book is any treatment of southern culture. No mention is made of the literature spawned by southern journalists or firebrands like Edmund Ruffin. Nor is any mention made of the southern reactionary movement spawned by former Confederate soldiers, including Nathan Bedford Forrest, who would go on to help found the Ku Klux Klan.
And one of the renowned voices in American culture, Mark Twain, started the war as a Confederate soldier and ended it as one of the best-known humorists in American history. Simarlarly, Fuller gives scant consideration to Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane and Lew Wallace.
What is missing from this book is any treatment of southern culture. No mention is made of the literature spawned by southern journalists or firebrands like Edmund Ruffin. Nor is any mention made of the southern reactionary movement spawned by former Confederate soldiers, including Nathan Bedford Forrest, who would go on to help found the Ku Klux Klan.
And one of the renowned voices in American culture, Mark Twain, started the war as a Confederate soldier and ended it as one of the best-known humorists in American history. Simarlarly, Fuller gives scant consideration to Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane and Lew Wallace.
February 9, 2016
4.5 stars. Loved it. Will assign it in Civil War seminar this fall.
July 17, 2017
It should have been called, "How the Civil War depressed the Transcendentalist authors."
July 24, 2018
Another great book by Fuller.
March 19, 2021
Excellent book. I thought it would be a bit broader in scope but ultimately appreciated the book’s narrative focus on Emerson, Melville, Whitman, Hawthorne, Higgins, and Dickinson.
March 6, 2017
This is a fascinating account of the impact of the Civil War on the major literary figures of its time, and I read it with great interest and admiration – and highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in that era and in Whitman, Emerson, Hawthorne, and the other giants of that time. But I don't feel the author even attempted to provide insight into how the War transformed American literature. His brief mention of Twain, Crane, and Bierce left me wishing he had pursued his topic into the post-war years and offered a bigger picture.
November 25, 2016
I doubt if a book like Fuller's could be written about the Afghanistan or Iraq invasions. I doubt it because as horrific as those wars have been, the ratio of suffering far favors those with the winning technology (with U. S. killed over a dozen years almost at 5,000 in Iraq after having inflicted around 1.5 million Iraqi killed). I doubt it because during those wars, Americans had smartphones and Netflix and the NFL and iPads and video games and only went without while camping.
During the War between the States, with almost 700,000 killed in four years on both sides, every family felt its destruction. Fuller chronicles how that destruction impacted American writers. Beginning with Emerson, Fuller traces Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Alcott, Thoreau (who died in 1862), Whitman, Higginson, Bierce, and Lincoln. Fuller relates how these writers viewed the war, experienced it, and how it appeared in their works. For example, I never knew before that Dickinson, who rarely traveled far from home, read everything she could on the war from newspapers and wrote around 600 poems during those four years. And I never knew that Melville volunteered to participate on a raid with Lowell in 1864 in Virginia to probe how vast the myth of Mosby was (in comparison to his own fictive Ahab). And reading how Whitman witnessed the war as a nurse, how it challenged his explosive optimism resonated with me.
Now the volcano is dormant. But reading Fuller's work deepened my appreciation of American writers writing during the Civil War.
During the War between the States, with almost 700,000 killed in four years on both sides, every family felt its destruction. Fuller chronicles how that destruction impacted American writers. Beginning with Emerson, Fuller traces Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Alcott, Thoreau (who died in 1862), Whitman, Higginson, Bierce, and Lincoln. Fuller relates how these writers viewed the war, experienced it, and how it appeared in their works. For example, I never knew before that Dickinson, who rarely traveled far from home, read everything she could on the war from newspapers and wrote around 600 poems during those four years. And I never knew that Melville volunteered to participate on a raid with Lowell in 1864 in Virginia to probe how vast the myth of Mosby was (in comparison to his own fictive Ahab). And reading how Whitman witnessed the war as a nurse, how it challenged his explosive optimism resonated with me.
Now the volcano is dormant. But reading Fuller's work deepened my appreciation of American writers writing during the Civil War.
February 28, 2011
Review forthcoming in The Journal of Military History.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews