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RR 2013/240 The Cambridge Companion to Abraham Lincoln Edited by Shirley Samuels Cambridge University Press Cambridge 2012 xv + 238 pp. ISBN 978 0 521 19316 0 (hbck); ISBN 978 0 521 14573 2 (pbck) £50 $90 (hbck); £17.99 $27.99 (pbck) Cambridge Companions to American Studies
Keywords History, Nineteenth century, Politics, United States of America
Review DOI 10.1108/RR-02-2013-0043
I came to this review armed with a full battery of opinions about Lincoln's political career: Lincoln and the Republican Party, Lincoln and slavery, Lincoln and the south, etc. But I needn't have bothered. Such views are largely irrelevant to a book like this. It belongs to a series on American Studies, a subject which has one foot in politics and the other in literature and culture. Befitting this, the authors have tried to see Lincoln through a wide-angle lens, exploring facets of the sixteenth president which go beyond his life in the White House. A sure sign of this is the subject affiliations of the men and women who have helped to write the book: out of a dozen contributors, we have one art historian and one political scientist. All the rest are literary critics and professors of English, including the editor, Professor Shirley Samuels (English and Women's Studies, Cornell). Professor Samuels does not contribute a piece herself by the way.
We already have libraries full of books on his political life, so a wider reading of Lincoln the man is welcome. Essays like Professor Faith Barrett's on his liking for poetry or Harold Bush's piece on Lincoln and the Spiritual Crisis are a nice change. Carol Payne examines the visual depictions of the president. He liked...