Book Review: From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature by Randall Fuller. Oxford University Press, 2011

• Published in: Literature & History Vol. 21; no. 1; p. 106
• Main Author: Noel, Rebecca R
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: London Sage Publications Ltd 01.04.2012
• Subjects: Alcott, Louisa May (1832-1888); Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886); Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895); Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882); Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864); Melville, Herman (1819-1891); Whitman, Walt (1819-1892)
• ISSN: 0306-1973; 2050-4594

Fuller charges this allegedly insular literary scene with creating the impasse that led to war, twice repeating as fact the apocryphal anecdote about Lincoln blaming the war on Uncle Tom's Cabin: 'These writers came to realize, as would their culture, that ... their faith in liberty and human rights had resulted in unprecedented death and misery' (p. 9). Did decades of politicians, jurists, complex economic factors and secession not play a role? Did the writers' once-minority abolitionist position not, in fact, turn the war's tide through emancipation and prevail? (Unlike most scholars, Fuller maintains that Hawthorne supported abolition.) Even those who emphasise cultural causes of the war would find this version narrow and the author does not argue for its merit.