Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War (Civil War America) by Stephen Cushman (PDF)

Description

War destroys, but it also inspires, stimulates, and creates. It is, in this way, a muse, and a powerful one at that. The American Civil War was a particularly prolific muse–unleashing with its violent realities a torrent of language, from soldiers’ intimate letters and diaries to everyday newspaper accounts, great speeches, and enduring literary works. In Belligerent Muse, Stephen Cushman considers the Civil War writings of five of the most significant and best known narrators of the conflict: Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, William Tecumseh Sherman, Ambrose Bierce, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Considering their writings both as literary expressions and as efforts to record the rigors of the war, Cushman analyzes their narratives and the aesthetics underlying them to offer a richer understanding of how Civil War writing chronicled the events of the conflict as they unfolded and then served to frame the memory of the war afterward.Elegantly interweaving military and literary history, Cushman uses some of the war’s most famous writers and their works to explore the profound ways in which our nation’s great conflict not only changed the lives of its combatants and chroniclers but also fundamentally transformed American letters.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review Offers a new way to understand histories of the war as complex literary expressions in their own right.–Journal of Southern HistoryRecommended.–CHOICERanges the narration of military events on a spectrum from the mundane or utilitarian to a higher ‘yearning for dignity, strength, and grandeur.’–American Literature Review Belligerent Muse is a beautifully written, rich, and engaging work that convincingly argues we should pay attention to the aesthetics of war writing, including military history. Offering fresh insight on every page, this is not only a great pleasure to read but also a major addition to the literature of the Civil War.–Alice Fahs, University of California, Irvine About the Author Stephen Cushman is Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia.Gary W. Gallagher is John L. Nau III Professor of History at the University of Virginia and author or editor of numerous books, including Lee and His Army in Confederate History and The Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐An academic’s review of the selected tracks of five writers, all of whom who had written from personal experiences arising from the Civil War.There are some nice insights provided here, but too often Professor Cushman’s prose simply does not stand a chance against the gifted writers whose work he dissects. And, as I closed his book,I failed to understand the importance many of the points made, such as on the different ways Joshua Chamberlain wrote about his role in the final surrender of Lee’s troops.Not a bad book, but not one in the league with the volumes written by such experts as White or Kaplan; experts who have plumbed the depths of President Lincoln’s writings.

⭐This is an important movie about brave people who were not complacent. The movie tells their story which begins with hope and optimism but evolves to despair after arrests and brutality. The editing is top notch, great cinematography and the music is perfect.

⭐• No maps or images. Notes. Index.• 5 essays considering R.W. Emerson, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address & 2ND Inaugural Address, Walt Whitman’s telling of the ‘real war’ in books, Sherman as writer (his Memoirs), Ambrose Bierce & Chickamauga, & Joshua Chamberlain (on the honorable ‘salute’ during the surrender of the Army of N Va infantry at Appomattox). An interesting work, & to me, uneven work — details below. I am pleased that I bought this book, and definitely not sorry to have read it in its entirety. But it is a book definitely for an engaged, reflective reader who enjoys chewing on the ideas presented. Definitely his “Last Words” summary will require (for most) quite a bit of effort due to being burdened with philosophical references. (I have had some limited exposure.) If you do not have any such background, then skip that section to improve your reading experience with little loss. I consider Emerson & Lincoln to be really two separate essays. The analysis of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address & 2nd Inaugural Address is well worth the read for you. The Emerson / Lincoln ‘meeting’ seems to be quite speculative, but it is an interesting detective tale and does provide insight into Emerson’s perspective on the world. I personally found the essay on Sherman’s memoir clear & providing insight into the man. Chamberlain’s evolving memories of the surrender of Lee’s infantry in the Army of N VA at Appomattox were a nice read. Cushman’s analysis has me questioning how much of Joshua’s revisions were intentional for his own benefit. The Bierce essay illustrates how one’s memory is clouded amidst battle. But then Ambrose has probably had the greatest influence on how we perceive war of all the authors examined. The essay on Walt Whitman was intriquing regarding the difficulty in your ‘knowing’ somehow what is ‘the truth’. It deals with Whitman’s quest to attain that difficult goal. I hope this has been helpful.FOR AN EXCEPTIONAL READ, consider Cushman’s earlier Bloody Promenade which examines the American Civil War battle of the Wilderness from different perspectives in time from eyewitnesses to histories. The insights from that work should help in understanding the Whitman, Brose & Chamberlain essays in this work.

⭐The premise of Belligerent Muse is quite different than anything published in recent years. For the first time, an author has taken a certain few people and analyzed their works in order to understand how we look at the war today. What Stephen Cushman has come up with is interesting in not only an analysis of the war, but of an analysis of the people themselves. The five writers he looks into are Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, William T. Sherman, Ambrose Bierce and Joshua L. Chamberlain. These five essays are pose different questions about the different authors and what we are left with is an excellent work of critical analysis. Stephen Cushman is the Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia. His work Belligerent Muse is part of the Civil War America series. This series of works , published by the University of North Carolina Press, publishes historical works that explore all aspects of the war and shed new light on the great conflict. The foreword of this work was written by Gary W. Gallagher. The essays of the book talk about the many different ways in which these influential authors and officers shaped our understanding of the American Civil War outside of the realm of Lost Cause Historiography since Cushman focuses on Union voices. His analysis of Lincoln is quite interesting in the almost song like style which he wrote his speeches. The two main speeches which he focuses on is the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural and the reasons for which we gravitate toward them. Cushman also talks about the influence which Emerson and his speeches had on Lincoln. The work shines, however, during the essay about Sherman and the way in which he penned his memoirs. This was my favorite chapter in the book and is full with intricate details on the mindset of Sherman. He even shows research into the process of Sherman showing that the officer did not want to print anything that was not true unlike the others who were writing in the Reconstruction period. Throughout the essay on Sherman, there are constant comparisons between Grant and his memoirs. While Grant may have embellished some of the details, Sherman was straightforward and published the truth to the best of his abilities. The essay of Bierce details some of the issues which plagued Civil War fiction since the end of the conflict mainly the description of the dead. Cushman details the inaccuracies in Bierce’s work when dealing with a place such as Chickamauga. The essays close out with the shortest entry into the book on Joshua L. Chamberlain. Chamberlain gained much of his fame recently due to Ron Maxwell’s Gettysburg and Gods and Generals along with the works written by the Shaara family. This essay was the most telling about the officer during the Civil War and the way in which history was written. His analysis of Chamberlain comes off as the “Big Fish” story where the situation became more and more embellished and detailed. The last recounting of the story is left up to the reader and the historian as to the truth of the situation. It can be said that due to Chamberlain’s self-promotion, many historians have questioned the reality of his words over time. This is an angle which Cushman analyzes and concludes in this essay. This work is interesting in the very scope of what it attempts. For quite some time, there have been historians who have looked into the realm of Lost Cause Historiography but not many have looked into the works of Union soldiers and civilians after the war. What Cushman has delivered here is an analysis on the ways in which the victors wrote the war and even alludes to the people outside his main five subjects. It is quite amazing that five different ways of writing were shown here and these five different ways have even stood tall today in the study of the war. The mindset of “primary sources must be trusted” is a good one to have, but most of them should be taken with a grain of salt as you will see within the essays written here by Cushman. I highly recommend this book to the Civil War student and scholar who wishes to know more about the reality of the sources we trust and I praise Cushman for the scholarship which he has brought to this study.Matthew Bartlett – Gettysburg Chronicle

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