Patriotism by Proxy

The author’s clever analysis and daring questions are evident in each chapter of this wide-ranging and thought-provoking book. * Brian Matthew Jordan, Home Front Studies *A remarkable analysis of the culture of the Civil War draft that brings together literature, history, and theory in exciting and original ways. Boggs excavates a wonderful archive of songs, poems, novels, political cartoons, and other works, offering lively close readings that show the importance of the Civil War draft to struggles over identity, citizenship, and power. * Elizabeth Young, Carl M. and Elsie A. Small Professor of English; Chair of English, Mount Holyoke *Colleen Glenney Boggs has given us a breathtaking reminder that, however vast the historiography of the US Civil War, new insights still await — especially when the richness of wartime cultural production comes under a great literature scholar’s keen eye. With fastidious research and spellbinding analysis, Patriotism by Proxy unearths the tropological effects of the US’s first national military draft and its peculiar logic of substitution. In Boggs’s lucid and captivating account, the draft jolted the cultural meanings of citizenship, extending the reach of federal power into American lives yet unleashing the emancipatory potential of citizenship for Black soldiers. * Christopher Hager, Trinity College; author of I Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War Letters and Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing *

Colleen Glenney Boggs is Professor of English at Dartmouth College. A specialist in nineteenth-century American literature, she is the author of Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity (Columbia University Press, 2013) and Transnationalism and American Literature: Literary Translation 1773-1892 (Routledge, 2007). Her work has appeared in American Literature, PMLA, Cultural Critique, and J19, among others. She edited the volume MLA Options for Teaching the Literatures of the American Civil War (Modern Language Association, 2016), and co-edits the book series Edinburgh Critical Studies in Atlantic Literatures and Cultures. She has served on the PMLA Editorial Board and as Director of the Leslie Center for the Humanities, and is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Mellon Foundation.