| Popis: |
Contra conventional wisdom, this introductory chapter proposes that the Civil War dead were understood in relation to four epistemic predicaments that shaped not only an American but a broadly Western modernity in the late nineteenth century: (1) a growing sense of the eᶊentially mediated character of all experience and a loᶊ of faith in the coherence of the individual subject; (2) the increasing dominance of the image in political and social relations and in shaping how Americans knew the world; (3) an erosion of traditional and nationalist views regarding the meaning of historical change and of the present’s relationship to the past; and (4) a newly secular emphasis on complexity, contingency, and chance in the workings of the world. These social and intellectual dilemmas provide an organizational scheme for the book, which is structured around four cultural archives: eyewitneᶊ accounts, visual art, histories of the war, and narrative fiction. |
