New Books In Literary Studies

How do we use words to tease out the “real” that history strives to capture? Listen to my conversation with Stephen Cushman, as we consider the historian’s art through Cushman’s book, Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). Stephen Cushman is Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia. In addition to critical scholarly work on poetics and form, he has published five collections of poetry, and another book on the Civil War, Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle. That is the Battle of the Wilderness, the bloody field of which Cushman lives in close proximity, where it has prodded him over the years to reflect on the history that flows unheeded through our lives, until, at moments, it erupts. In Belligerent Muse, Cushman is interested, and points us with gentle precision, to the act of writing: thinking, deliberating, trying out words and phrases, compo