John Brown's Body

“Original and provocative.” — American Historical Review

“Interesting and thought-provoking. . . . [A] creative investigation of familiar literary texts.” — Journal of African American History

“Challenges us to confront the many faces of death and suffering in what was without question one of America’s darkest hours.” — History

“Nudelman’s is an ambitious work that strives to offer an alternative interpretation of the familiar and not so familiar aspects of Civil War violence and death, and of 'the power of the dead to produce civic unity out of civil war.'” — Journal of American Studies

“A thoughtful and relevant examination of that American studies staple: found materials. . . . Nudelman’s view of 'slavery, violence, and the culture of war' is a valuable contribution to American thematic study.” — American Literature

“An intriguing exploration of the cultural work required by the massive destruction of the Civil War.” — Drew Gilpin Faust, author of Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War

“In its harrowing and compassionate evocation of historic American deathways, John Brown’s Body demonstrates the enduring efficacy of the corpse in our national political life. Ranging from John Brown’s body to Emmet Till’s, but not forgetting John Wilkes Booth’s, Franny Nudelman’s eloquent readings of Civil War battlefield photographs and their photojournalistic successors show us how popularly circulated images of violent death create the conditions for newly envisioned communities of the living.” — Joseph Roach, Yale University

“John Brown’s Body addresses the physical specificity of bodily violence in war with an unflinching gaze that refuses to allow this wounded and mutilated flesh to metamorphose into the abstractions of personal honor or national glory. In showing how state power and race power build themselves out of corpses, Nudelman reveals the mechanisms of abstraction without falling prey to them herself. This is an important and innovative work.” — Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Amherst College