Publishing the Civil War: The literary marketplace and the meanings of the Civil War in the North, 1861-1865

A cultural history of the Civil War, this study examines Northern wartime book publishing as a process central to creating the war's meanings. Publishers issued an outpouring of popular war-related literature during the war, including sensationalist adventure literature, sentimental romances, histories, political pamphlets and children's war stories. This literature shaped a cultural politics of war: it gendered the war by prescribing wartime roles for men and women as well as boys and girls; it conventionalized Northern attitudes towards slavery and emancipation; and it articulated and renegotiated the relationship between individual and nation. The processes of the literary marketplace, including literary strategies, marketing devices and publishing programs shaped by authors, publishers and readers, thus played a vital role in forging wartime national consciousness.;Early in the war publishers produced parlor-table war "gift books" that imagined the war within the conventions of an antebellum culture of middle-class, genteel refinement; but after defeat at Bull Run in July of 1861 Northern writers again began to explore the central issues of slavery and freedom. Deeply revealing of the limitations of their thinking was the slogan "emancipation for the sake of the white man," popularized in a new national magazine devoted to that viewpoint.;In the spring and summer of 1862 a series of sensationalist works popularized the war as adventure, but by late 1862 and 1863 the devastation of war began to be reflected in a sentimental literature that discovered the suffering body of the ordinary soldier. By 1864 the meaning of the war had been contained in an extensive popular literature--including histories and children's books--that minimized the importance of emancipation to the meaning of the conflict. In contrast to the writings of Northern intellectuals, who often celebrated centralization and organization as central meanings of the war, a vast popular literature had by war's end established individual adventure as one of the war's central meanings, while simultaneously denying a connection between freedom and equality.