The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865.

By Alice Fahs. Civil War America. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2001. Pp. [xiv], 410. $39.95, ISBN 0-8078-2581-6.)

Although anyone familiar with the popular press of the 1860s is painfully aware that the Civil War was not "the unwritten war," as Daniel Aaron dubbed it, the rich mine of popular wartime literature has remained virtually unexplored. With The Imagined Civil War, Alice Fahs addresses this neglect, contending that popular literature reinforced gender lines, explored racial attitudes, and ultimately "helped to shape new modes of imagining individuals' relationships to the nation" (p. 2). While any attempt to discern public sentiment invites certain criticisms, this is a fine book of interest to anyone studying the Civil War and Reconstruction, nationalism and the nineteenth-century state, women's history, or American literature.

Fahs uses newspaper poetry, magazine stories, dime novels, song sheets, juvenile and sensational novels, and popular histories to explore the "cultural politics of war" (p. 1). Maintaining that the public both shaped and reflected print culture, Fahs writes that literature revealed the complicated construction of a new relationship between individuals and the nation, although more successfully in the North than in the South. She argues that war poems from both sides in 1861 celebrated the submersion of the individual in a unified national cause, but as the war became increasingly impersonal, northern self-effacement gave way to individualistic nationalism. Even as soldiers became anonymous, literature fought against wartime organization and "asserted the importance and individuality of the ordinary soldier" (p. 93). Literature lionizing the dying individual offered a new vision of nationality. "[I]t was not an abstract notion of country that made the individual deaths of soldiers meaningful but the reverse: the suffering and deaths of soldiers themselves provided a new way of understanding a previously abstract nationhood" (p. 119).

In this "people's war," literature helped northerners explore their relationship to the nation, while in the South a shortage of printing supplies, dependence on northern culture, and traditional views of women and African Americans limited the use of literature for nation-building. In northern literature, women emphasized wartime sacrifices and linked the family in a reciprocal relationship with the government; black soldiers earned a place in

the national community; and humorists suggested that even misfits belonged in the new nation. Sensational and juvenile novels obliterated distinctions of class, age, and gender, Fahs argues, offering individuals adventure and heroism in the service of the nation, creating a "form of nationalism ... congruent with an ideology of self-interest as well as with an adherence to a new collectivity" (p. 271). Fahs also suggests that war histories that "depicted national affairs and yet were sold in intimate, face-to-face encounters" (p. 310) cemented this new form of nationalism, physically linking the local and the national.

This is a strong book with engaging prose, dramatic verbs, and subtle humor. Fahs's argument challenges the prevailing belief that the war organized a new dominant nationalism; it explains how individualism prospered in a postwar era of consolidation. The specific weaknesses of the book--the vague exploration of how profit-making affected wartime literature, the prevalence of descriptions of war humor and popular images of blacks over detailed analysis, an incomplete index--do not detract from its thesis. Popular histories beg readers to doubt that written sources reflect the beliefs of contemporaries and to worry that the artificial organization of culture into discrete chapters destroys contextuality and distorts popular beliefs. But the provocative conclusions of a book like The Imagined Civil War illustrate that the problems of popular history pale before the possibilities of opening innovative perspectives on the past.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
Massachusetts Institute of Technology