Book Review

Alice Fahs's The Imagined Civil War reintroduces historians to the poems, short stories, novels, songs, "juveniles," and histories that circulated as vernacular literature during the Civil War. It is not so much that these forms of expression have been forgotten. Most Americans can hum the "Yellow Rose of Texas" or Maryland's inappropriate state song, "Maryland, My Maryland." We remember as well that our sixteenth president was a great admirer of the humorist Petroleum Nasby. Rather, after highbrow literature was summarily dismissed by Daniel Aaron and Edmund Wilson, the literary expression of the Civil War became mostly invisible save for the occasional quote of a line of verse or reference to a plot.

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In her immensely valuable analysis, Fahs moves beyond the familiar categories of high- and lowbrow writing to reclaim the Civil War's popular writing. In both North and South this literature served as a vital force reflecting the war's meaning, at the same time that it shaped "a cultural politics of war" in which sometimes shifting attitudes toward race, community, youth, and nation were expressed. Fahs classifies this imagined war topically by section, genre of writing, and subject. Using new understandings of the interaction between the economic and social practices of print culture, she also develops generalizations that offer an avenue toward penetrating what the war meant to those who lived through it.

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