Table 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.)

Reviews

"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