“We are at guessing,” Adam Gurowski wrote in his diary on the evening of 17 October 1863. Where and when would Union and Confederate forces next meet? How close was General Robert E. Lee to Washington, DC? Alexander Nemerov probes the “interior life” of “thinking man” Gurowski in his chapter on “inward states and spaces” in Civil War Washington (118, 116, 101). But Gurowski is not the only one guessing in Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War: speculation is part of Nemerov's modus operandi. “I wanted to see how a performance of [Macbeth] might have shaped a world around it,” he explains (1). (Macbeth because “both the Macbeths have such vivid spatial imaginations” (2).) Suggestions provide Acting in the Night with its keynote.

Art historian Nemerov anchors his experimental study of the “spatial and place-making powers of art” in wartime Washington, yet only when he found that Macbeth was Abraham Lincoln's “favourite play” did the Civil War become part of his plan (5, 4). This fact prompted him to concentrate on a performance Lincoln attended; one took place at Grover's National Theatre in Washington on the night of 17 October 1863. Acting in the Night begins with a poem rather than a date. Nemerov uses Wallace Stevens's “Anecdote of the Jar” to conceptualize performance; both the placement of the jar and the performance of a play, he suggests, comprise “aesthetic gesture[s]” with the power to “turn chaos into cosmos” (1). Yet the gestures he identifies in Macbeth – and in novels by Hawthorne and Melville – do not make a world. Instead they describe a void and mark it with a “spot,” a slight sign of human presence. The friction between world-making and void-marking acts becomes the book's major theme.

Critical work on the visual culture of the Civil War has tended to focus on battlefield photography, pictorial reportage, painting and popular prints. Acting in the Night has a wider reach: ranging over mid-nineteenth-century American culture, Nemerov selects sculptures, buildings, photographs, drawings, maps, monuments, paintings and illustrations from contemporary newspapers to place alongside Macbeth. This approach results in some fascinating juxtapositions; in chapter 3, for example, his description of Julia Ward Howe's secluded-connected hotel room at Willard's provides a new context for her “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Nemerov's original constellations of texts and contexts comprise one of the book's pleasures, and his creative engagement with artworks and art objects results in many compelling readings. By contrast, his literary analyses and historical contextualizations often consist of paraphrases and quotations.

The jacket flap claims that Acting in the Night “illuminate[s] American art, politics, technology, and life as it was being lived.” But for Nemerov, the play's the thing. He glances at technological, political and intellectual contexts in order to recover a sense of the power of an “aesthetic gesture.” In the first chapter, for instance, Nemerov turns to contemporary communications technologies to demonstrate that Charlotte Cushman sought to command space within and without the theatre. Readers are invited to “[c]onsider the postal service and her relation to it” – her “new postal world” is delineated with a sentence from David Henkin's The Postal Age (2007) (17). Later in the same chapter, Nemerov's brilliant analysis of Randolph Rogers's “melodramatic” sculpture Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii (1854–55) reveals the futility of Cushman's attempt to gather and fix “the far-flung world of randomness” into permanent, meaningful order (46, 35).

Nemerov's “lines” of argument emerge from a haze of associations and questions; instead of persuading readers to accept his logic, he invites them to move from one possibility to the next. His distinctive style is exhilarating and frustrating by turns. In so far as a summary of the book's content is possible, chapters 1 and 2 form a kind of pair; the second chapter turns from Cushman's fantasies of reach and order to “the intensities of effect, of being in one place only, that were the main feature of Lincoln's conception of space” (68). As little is known about the President's response to the performance, Nemerov pieces together hints from a variety of sources, including Lincoln's “Spot Resolutions” speech of 1847 and his official business on 17 October, as well as accounts of the play of light in Grover's theatre and “the general iconography of Lincoln's politics” (72). The marked void finds a central place in Lincoln's philosophy. The third chapter (mentioned above) feels for connections between “inward states and spaces” in the city (including the “private space” of Grover's theatre) and the “outside world” (101). Here, Nemerov reads the “radical withdrawals” in stories by Silas Weir Mitchell and Edward Everett Hale alongside artworks by Thomas Eakins and Worthington Whittredge, and uses Thomas Crawford's public sculpture to reconstruct Adam Gurowski's response to “huge outside pressures” generated by the war (108, 122).

Chapters 4 and 5 consider Macbeth's resistance to the “crushing forces” of the “outside world” as they were realized in the chaotic “field of sound” that enveloped the city and its environs (136, 138). Imagining the words of the play as transmissions (“a type of radio before radio”), Nemerov follows fragments of Macbeth to Castle Murray, a Medieval Revival house in Virginia, which allows him to explore the “strange situational possibilities of a work of art touching down at a particular spot, chancing to spark a momentary realization for a person who happens to be there” (176, 161). Here, the line “Out, damned spot” “may … have suggested the performance's own failure to eradicate all imperfections, all weird, unsettling allusions to life” (177). Chapter 6 interprets the death of Colonel Thomas Ruffin (d. 17 October) as one such spot or allusion, and describes hauntings that occurred as audience members layered Macbeth with their own associations. Nemerov's metaphors work hard throughout the book; at the close of chapter 6, they inspire an opaque meditation on the “real trick of history” (to attend to “the emptiness that official declarations make visible”) (199).

Acting in the Night ends with Cushman and the wilderness. Nemerov argues that Macbeth troubled the contemporary view of nature which privileged “unification and wholeness” in “a God-driven universe” (204). “[A]lien space” and the “silent sign” triumph in his provocative readings of photographs of the Wilderness battlefield, but his closing suggestion that a hidden stream beneath the theatre “might have given the right empty shape to Cushman's performance” raises questions about the extent to which his own criteria of judgement influenced his reconstructions of mid-nineteenth-century gestures and responses (217, 226). It is worth noting that “Anecdote of the Jar” begins with a subject-speaker: “I placed a jar in Tennessee” (l.1). As the creator of a “tale,” Nemerov is involved in acts of placement and arrangement too. Although the introduction's opening sentence obscures his agency with an organic metaphor (Acting in the Night “grew out of [his] wish”), his ideas of order pervade the book. A fuller explanation of key concepts – including the “aesthetic gesture,” “the artistic site,” perfection (as in “a perfected work of art,” “a perfected drama”) and “the realm of Art” – would have helped readers to negotiate his unique mixture of improvisation and reconstruction (1, 177, 175, 184).

In terms of approach, Randall Fuller's From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature is more conventional than Acting in the Night. Fuller's study traces the ways in which “America's greatest writers” responded to the “aesthetic and moral challenges created by the war” (9, 165). Emerson, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson dominate one or more chapters – the selection is predictable, but Fuller's fine readings spring some surprises. Chapter 6, one of the best in the book, presents Emerson's war in a new light: “the great private drama of [Emerson's] war years” arose from his struggle to reconcile his commitment to an abolition war with his desire to keep his only living son from harm (130). Relevant tropes and texts weave between chapters (volcanoes, Dante's Divine Comedy and Les Misérables amongst them); in addition to Fuller's gift for organization, his prose is elegant and lively.

Most of the chapters in From Battlefields Rising concentrate on an author or a pair of authors, and pairs of chapters are interlinked within the study's larger chronology. For example, chapter 2 presents Hawthorne's Atlantic Monthly essay “Chiefly about War-Matters” (1862) as a critical response to his New England neighbours’ self-righteous certainty that God was on their side. Chapter 8 returns to Hawthorne; in a dazzling reading of The Elixir of Life (1872) which draws on Edward Everett Hale's “The Man without a Country” (1863) as well as Brady's photographs, Fuller elucidates Hawthorne's experience of alienation and its consequences. The first chapter charts Whitman's uncertain response to the outbreak of war via readings of the draft “Blow Mad Winds!” and “Beat! Beat! Drums!” (1865) – Whitman's later hospital experiences and writings are placed alongside those of Louisa May Alcott and Silas Weir Mitchell in chapter 7. The discussion of Hospital Sketches (1871) and Drum-Taps (1865) adds little to existing work on these texts; Fuller does not always manage to transform familiar material.

As one might expect, Emerson features prominently in Fuller's narrative. The introduction explores Emerson's fascination with the volcanic forces, and interprets his “dream fit for Dante’ as a “nightmare of national dissolution” which encoded anxieties about his own role in the conflict (9).Footnote ¹ Chapter 3 describes Emerson's attempts to adjust his optimistic philosophy to the reality of Union defeat and, more specifically, to the scale of the carnage at Shiloh (6–7 April 1862). The lecture “Moral Forces” is neatly paired with Melville's “Shiloh” (for Melville, the battle “rendered transcendental philosophy instantly and irrevocably obsolete” (70)). In chapter 6, Fuller's focus on intergenerational relationships allows him to recover traces of Emerson's “great private drama” in the journal entry “Negro Soldiers” and the verse tribute to New England martyr Robert Gould Shaw. “All he had once longed for, Emerson seems to have realized, would be built upon the sepulchers of the sons” (135).

The book's descriptions of people and places have an unusual immediacy: abandoned mansions contained “pianos that refused to stay in tune in the humid climate” of South Carolina's Sea Islands; Whitman found the blasted earth of the Fredericksburg battlefield “loamy, damp, and smelling of minerals” (99, 136). From Battlefields Rising also discusses a number of texts in impressive depth (who else has noticed echoes of The Marble Faun in “Chiefly about War-Matters”?) Few introductions to the Civil War experiences and writings of the stars of the American Renaissance manage to do as much, yet the project's scope also means that some readings are less well developed than others. Frederick Douglass is listed as one of the study's key figures (jacket flap, 8), but his wartime speeches and editorials (together with his 1845 Narrative) are summarized in approximately five pages of text (101–6). From Battlefields Rising touches on the formal significance of essays and novels but has little to say about verse form. This seems particularly problematic in chapters 4 and 9; lineation, syntax and rhyme mattered to Dickinson and Melville. Although Fuller notes that “The Scout toward Aldie” is “an aesthetic recreation of the Wilderness” which Melville “designed to trip up readers” (190), the trap-laden lines in his quotations are presented as self-explanatory. The pressures of space are most evident in the final chapter on the war's survivors and legacies; Fuller's hurried summary of the “epic reimagining of the war in the last third of the nineteenth century” is somewhat awkward (221).

Fuller does not allow references to critical literature to clog his narrative; still, one could have wished for a better account of the decisions he made as a result of his engagement with the landmark studies invoked in the “Acknowledgments.” Simply stating a “debt … too large to delineate here” (ix), he misses an opportunity to articulate arguments implicit in his title and focus. Alice Fahs is one of the scholars on his short list; a brief look at her survey The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861–1865 (2001) throws some of Fuller's decisions into relief. Fuller privileges the work of writers from New England and New York; what of the influence and status of war literature from other regions? How does the South fit into his story? Didn't “America's greatest writers” respond to “popular literature” as well as to each other during the war? Nevertheless, the strengths of From Battlefields Rising should earn it a place alongside the work of Fahs, Sweet and Dawes.

Taken as a pair, From Battlefields Rising and Acting in the Night hint at the diversity of the most recent work on the Civil War. Nemerov's account of the relation between art, space and place is original and challenging, whilst Fuller's literary-biographical approach illuminates a cluster of lesser-known and canonical war writings. In 2004, Drew Gilpin Faust noted that the Civil War had “come to be one of the liveliest fields in American history”; From Battlefields Rising and Acting in the Night suggest that the observation still holds true.Footnote ²