Through the negative

Megan Rowley Williams

The Civil War was the first image war, as photographs of the battlefields became the dominant means for capturing an epochal historical moment. At the same time, writers used the Civil War to present both their notions of nation and their ideas about the new intersections between photography and literary form. Through The Negative offers an account of the collisions between print and visual culture in the work of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain and Crane as they responded to and incorporated the work of such photographers as George Barnard, Alexander Gardner and Jacob Riis. This book examines how key 19th-century American writers attempted to combat, understand and incorporate the advent of photography in their fiction.