Author: Stephen Cushman<br />File Type: pdf<br />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 wars most famous writers and their works to explore the profound ways in which our nations great conflict not only changed the lives of its combatants and chroniclers but also fundamentally transformed American letters. **Review Offers a new way to understand histories of the war as complex literary expressions in their own right.--Journal of Southern History Recommended.--CHOICE Review Gorgeous and penetrating, Stephen Cushmans Belligerent Muse gives us five exquisite lessons in the anatomy of style. From the lilt of Lincolns language to the barbs of Bierce and the pageantry of Chamberlain, Belligerent Muse takes readers into the complicated literary history of how the war was spun and how a national bloodletting transformed the writing of history and the history of writing in the United States.--Stephen Berry, University of Georgia 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 Stephen Cushman presents an excellent and thoroughly researched overview of a timely topic--the relation of the Civil War to the writings of men whose engagement both with fighting the war and with writing the war resonate with nineteenth century American culture.--Shirley Samuels, Cornell University