The war on words

"The War on Words delivers an impressively wide ranging reinterpretation, at once rigorously astringent and perceptively sympathetic, of how canonical American writers coped with the formidable challenges not to engage in public talk about slavery and racism. Though some of Gilmore's assessments are bound to provoke controversy, no serious reader of this bookùwhich should indeed be required reading for all serious Americanistsùwill fail to come away informed and invigorated by Gilmore's understanding of the de facto constraints on expression that confront even our 'free' society, both then and now."ù Lawrence Buell, Harvard University. "The War on Words is a brave and brilliant book that explores the fact of censorship, particularly as it operated in matters of slavery and race, in nineteenth-century American literature and politics. While positioning the Civil War as the moment when 'the nature of utterance' shifted from the comic to the tragic, from prophecy to indirection, from abolitionists to the Klan, Gilmore nevertheless attends to the consistency, across the century, with which words are championed, attacked, feared, and erased. With remarkable range and acuity, Gilmore con