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DescriptionThe War on Words: Slavery, Race, and Free Speech in American Literature – July 30th 2010 by Michael T. Gilmore (Author) {Bindaredundat}  Product Details Hardcover: 344 pages Publisher: University Of Chicago Press (July 30th 2010) Language: English ISBN-10: 0226294137 ISBN-13: 978-0226294131 How did slavery and race impact American literature in the nineteenth century? In this ambitious book, Michael T. Gilmore argues that they were the carriers of linguistic restriction, and writers from Frederick Douglass to Stephen Crane wrestled with the demands for silence and circumspection that accompanied the antebellum fear of disunion and the postwar reconciliation between the North and South. Proposing a radical new interpretation of nineteenth-century American literature, The War on Words examines struggles over permissible and impermissible utterance in works ranging from Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” to Henry James’s The Bostonians. Combining historical knowledge with groundbreaking readings of some of the classic texts of the American past, The War on Words places Lincoln’s Cooper Union address in the same constellation as Margaret Fuller’s feminism and Thomas Dixon’s defense of lynching. Arguing that slavery and race exerted coercive pressure on freedom of expression, Gilmore offers here a transformative study that alters our understanding of nineteenth-century literary culture and its fraught engagement with the right to speak. “The War on Words is a brave and brilliant book that explores the fact of censorship, particularly as it operated in matters of slavery and race, in nineteenth-century American literature and politics. While positioning the Civil War as the moment when ‘the nature of utterance’ shifted from the comic to the tragic, from prophecy to indirection, from abolitionists to the Klan, Gilmore nevertheless attends to the consistency, across the century, with which words are championed, attacked, feared, and erased. With remarkable range and acuity, Gilmore convincingly demonstrates that what could not be said is as significant an impetus for the production and understanding of American literature as what could.” (Cindy Weinstein, California Institute of Technology) Most Helpful Customer Review Excellent, original examination of free speech and slavery By J. Smith on July 24, 2010 In this brilliant, well-argued, richly exemplified book, Gilmore uses 19th c. American literature to demonstrate the fragility of free speech against the forces of racism and appeasement, first in antebellum America, and then (in some ways even more markedly and distressingly) in the late 19th century nation. Gilmore manifests a deep, thorough and nuanced knowledge of his subject. And while he rigorously stays with his era, no reader can come away from the book without a deeper appreciation for the enduring legacy of race as a conversation most Americans are unwilling to have, and for the constancy of silencing as a power dynamic even in a democracy that claims to protect talk.  Sharing Widget |