Book Review

Canada and the United States

In her widely researched and elegantly written work, Alice Fahs sets out to answer a question that has been posed many times in the past but never adequately answered: why is it that one of the nation's most cataclysmic and wrenching events, the Civil War, did not produce a literature of comparable status? Why is it that we have no great Civil War novel written at the time to commemorate what was arguably the greatest turning point in our nation's history? Why did the nation have to wait for the publication of Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage in 1895 for anything even vaguely resembling a notable work on the war? Fahs's answer is, on the face of it, deceptively simple. It was the very extent of the transformation, the very depth of the way that the war cut through the social order, the very way in which it trammeled families, rode over regions, took down slavery, and destabilized gender roles that explains the failure to produce a great Civil War novel or Civil War literary genre at the time. Fahs thinks, however, that the war produced something of more substantive literary note, perhaps not better, but certainly greater in its social and cultural impact. According to Fahs, the Civil War called forth an outpouring of poetry, fiction, humor, and history from an unparalleled cross section of the population, a genuinely popular literature that addressed the experience of an even wider range of the nation's citizenry, including not only the common man but the common woman, the slave and the ex-slave, free African Americans, and even children. Precisely because the Civil War cut so deeply across the social order, transforming so many different lives in the process, it called out this unparalleled popular voice, a voice that while perhaps not great in formal literary terms, was great in its democratizing impact and in its individualizing power.

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