“Reading the List”: Casualty Lists and Civil War Poetry

Establishing a methodology for the book as a whole, this first chapter argues that the draft connected the abstractly political and concretely biopolitical via acts of public reading that occurred at the site of the draft lottery, when names were drawn that were then further disseminated in print. A popular literary trope, reading the names generated a citizenry that could be individuated (to the level of the subject) and function as a collective (generate populations), with the draft operating as an important hinge between these two scales of biopower. The draft lottery and its depictions in images and poetry, including Herman Melville’s, formed an assemblage that connected embodied with imagined communities and linked American lives to national ideology. Wartime print periodicals did not merely report on but actively participated in practices of public reading that drew on a range of gestures to facilitate military subject formations.

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“Reading the List”: Casualty Lists and Civil War Poetry

Cited by 2 publications

References 14 publications

Collaborative Dickinson

Collaborative Dickinson

Public Reading and the Civil War Draft Lottery

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