The Civil War was the first image war, as photographs of the battlefields became the dominant means for capturing an epochal historical moment. At the same time, writers used the Civil War to present both their notions of nation and their ideas about the new intersections between photography and literary form. Through The Negative offers an account of the collisions between print and visual culture in the work of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain and Crane as they responded to and incorporated the work of such photographers as George Barnard, Alexander Gardner and Jacob Riis. This book examines how...
The Civil War was the first image war, as photographs of the battlefields became the dominant means for capturing an epochal historical moment. At the...
This book reveals the strain of a moment in American cultural history that led several remarkable writers -- including Emerson, Warner, and Melville -- to render the stark rupture of loss in innovative ways. Pushing Protestant culture's sense of loss into secular terrain, these three key writers rejected Calvinist and sentimental models of bereavement, creating instead the compensations of a mature American literature whose 'originality' stemmed from its capacity to mourn the loss of a common culture and, through such mourning, to assent to new social and cultural realities. Balaam locates...
This book reveals the strain of a moment in American cultural history that led several remarkable writers -- including Emerson, Warner, and Melvill...
