Visions of Glory

The Civil War in Word and Image

Title Details

Pages: 256

Illustrations: 22 b&w images

Trim size: 9.000in x 9.000in

Formats

Hardcover

Pub Date: 11/01/2019

ISBN: 9-780-8203-5593-1

List Price: $36.95

Visions of Glory

The Civil War in Word and Image

Images and essays that shed light on the Civil War era, its culture, and meaning

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  • Description
  • Contributors

Visions of Glory brings together twenty-two images and twenty-two brisk essays, each essay connecting an image to the events that unfolded during a particular year of the Civil War. The book focuses on a diverse set of images that include a depiction of former slaves whipping their erstwhile overseer distributed by an African American publisher, a census graph published in the New York Times, and a cutout of a child’s hand sent by a southern mother to her husband at the front. The essays in this collection reveal how wartime women and men created both written accounts and a visual register to make sense of this pivotal period.

The collection proceeds chronologically, providing a nuanced history by highlighting the multiple meanings an assorted group of writers and readers discerned from the same set of circumstances. In so doing, this volume assembles contingent and fractured visions of the Civil War, but its differing perspectives also reveal a set of overlapping concerns. A number of essays focus in particular on African American engagements with visual culture. The collection also emphasizes the role that women played in making, disseminating, or interpreting wartime images. While every essay explores the relationship between image and word, several contributions focus on the ways in which Civil War images complicate an understanding of canonical writers such as Emerson, Melville, and Whitman.

James Berkey

Julia Stern

Jillian Spivey Caddell

Elizabeth Duquette

Eric Gardner

Sarah Gardner

Aston Gonzalez

Samuel Graber

Nathan Grant

Christopher Hager

Christopher Hanlon

Jeffrey Insko

Cody Marrs

Barbara McCaskill

Jane E. Schultz

Julia Stern

Timothy Sweet

Kristen Treen

About the Author/Editor

Kathleen Diffley (Editor)
KATHLEEN DIFFLEY is an associate professor of English at the University of Iowa and director of the Civil War Caucus at the M/MLA. She is the author of Where My Heart Is Turning Ever: Civil War Stories and Constitutional Reform, 1861–1876 and the coeditor of Visions of Glory: The Civil War in Word and Image (both Georgia). She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

Benjamin Fagan (Editor)
BENJAMIN FAGAN is an associate professor of English at Auburn University. He is the author of The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation (Georgia). He is also the editor of the forthcoming African American Literature in Transition, 1830–1850.