| During the Civil War, both black and white authors grapple with the potentials and limitations of metaphor to establish common ground between slaves and free whites, soldiers and war nurses, northerners and southerners. They compare the unfamiliar to the supposedly common in order to familiarize others. But because the war pits like against like, it changes the way authors conceptualize the relationship between the objects they are comparing. Furthermore, since this set of "objects" includes people on the cusp between slavery and freedom, the figure of the former slave is central to authors' meditations on who is deemed comparable to whom. Metaphor, race, and nation become intertwined in these texts. Not merely a literary tool, metaphor shapes, creates, and figures the contours of national belonging.; This study historicizes metaphor by examining its cultural work. While conventional rhetorical theories of comparison assume stable definitions against which to compare the unfamiliar, Frances Harper, Elizabeth Keckley, Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Walt Whitman confront the instability of definition. Conventional theories set a hierarchy that privileges one object of comparison over the other, naming one common and one unfamiliar; war texts confront the interplay between the elements of their comparisons, thereby problematizing the concept of "the common." This project thus recuperates texts often dismissed as cliched.; The Politics of Comparability considers rhetorical acts of comparison alongside political activity that includes Transcendentalist writings on similarity and abolitionist tracts in which sympathy is meant to establish commonality between whites and blacks. It also historicizes metaphor within the period's academic culture, which includes rhetorical handbooks about figurative language and cognitive psychologists' treatises on mental comparison. Comparison is also the project's structural logic as a range of contexts, genres, and authors are brought into conversation. While the Civil War has traditionally not been considered a significant era of literary production, this conversation reveals it to be a watershed moment in the history of rhetoric, making legible how race and slavery inflect rhetoric and how rhetorical figures intervene in debates over citizenship. |
