Studies in American Fiction

124Reviews one quantify or qualify anxiety when it appears everywhere in the historical record or, to put it differently, what makes one set of (inter)textual relations more anxious than another? Similarly, readers expecting the traditional authorial exercise of thesis, argument, and linear demonstration may become frustrated with the frequent jumps in Samuels' exposition and her deferral ofany conclusive judgments. She cautions that "interpretive work that crosses even the supposedly simpler disciplinary formations of history and literature must keep terms in productive suspension, tracing the abstractions of desire and power through layers of possibility" (23). Such deferrals have their ethical as well as epistemological rationales in Facing America, however, and these are perhaps most appropriate when Samuels engages the poignant photographic record of the Civil War. As she notes, photography became a popular medium for mapping, controlling, and memorializing the human body precisely at a time when new technologies of warfare were being mobilized to destroy it. Troops ofphotographers followed soldiers from battle to battle, for example, to make cartes de visiteîor nervous combatants to mail home (71). In "The Face ofthe Nation," the centerpiece of the book, Samuels explores the rhetorical crossing ofphotography, violence, and mourning in Whitman's poetic catalogs and elegies, medical photographs of (often naked) soldiers displaying their scars or missing limbs, and the posed photographs of Civil War dead created by Alexander Gardner, an employee of Matthew Brady and a prolific wartime photographer in his own right. What emerges from these juxtapositions is an "erotics ofnational trauma" in which ways ofviewing the human body both produce the interiority we now associate with individuality and reduce the individual to a representative type or instantiation—a face—of the nation (80). Especially here, Samuels' inquiry would benefit from the voices and first-person perspectives of Civil War soldiers themselves, such as those James McPherson provides in his analysis of Civil War letters and diaries, For Cause and Comrades: WhyMen Foughtin the Civil War(l997). Too idiosyncratic to become a standard account of the era's iconography or literature , Facing America nevertheless offers an intriguing look at the ideological contradictions and personal costs that informed what Lincoln called, in his First Inaugural, the nation's "mystic chords of memory." Berry CollegeChristopher Diller Csicsila, Joseph T. Canons byConsensus: Critical TrendsandAmerican LiteraryAnthologies. Tuscaloosa: Univ. ofAlabama Press, 2004. 288 pp. Cloth: $38.50. In 1847, the first two anthologies of American literature appeared, and the acrimony that ensued made clear that strong emotions attach to Studies in American Fiction125 the question ofwhat constitutes an appropriate canon ofAmerican literature . The Ducykinck brothers Cyclopedia ofAmerican Literaturereflected the editors' Democratic Party allegiances; it was capacious and ambitious, manifest in its literary destiny. It included writers from every region of the country, including the western frontier andthe South. Rufus Griswold's Poets and Poetry ofAmerica reflected the editor's Boston Whig cultural background. New Englanders dominated; no westerners were included. Literature of merit embodied Whig, not Democratic, values in Griswold's eyes. The Ducykincks and Griswold exchanged harsh reviews ofeach other, and the fact that neither side "won" is suggested by the durability of the debate between merit and inclusiveness. It still shapes discussions of American literature anthologies. Joseph Csicsila's excellent Canons by Consensus takes up the story a few decades later, after the teaching of American literature had become established in the academy and after the Modern Language Association had been founded (1883). Displaying a gift for accessible synopsis, Csicsila quickly summarizes the sorting points that distinguish the major phases of anthology creation down to the present before taking up specific writers and their fates. Literary historiography shaped the first phase and the major anthology of that era, The Cambridge History ofAmerican Literature (1917-21). It quickly became clear, however, that one effect ofputting an anthology before the public is to generate reflection on what might constitute alternatives. The New Humanists like Paul Elmer More were more interested in "literary craftmanship and formal structure" than in history and were highly critical of the Cambridge approach. More time would pass before their "merit" approach would become established. In the meantime , anthologies moved from compendia to textbooks for use in schools with Norman Foerster...