Facing America2004

"Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War investigates and explains the changing face of America during the Civil War. To conjure up a face for the nation, Shirley Samuels explores the body of the nation imagined both physically and metaphorically, arguing that the Civil War marks a dramatic shift from identifying the American nation as feminine to identifying it as masculine. Expressions of such a change appear in the allegorical configurations of nineteenth-century American novels, poetry, cartoons, and political rhetoric. Because of the visibility of war's assaults on the male body, masculine vulnerability became such a dominant facet of national life that it practically obliterated the visibility of other vulnerable bodies.

The simultaneous advent of photography and the Civil War...