Books: Visions of the Civil War

PATRIOTIC GORE (816 pp.)—Edmund Wilson—Oxford ($8.50).

Historians never seem to tire of running over the same Civil War battlegrounds. They have fought and refought the great campaigns, while often slighting the larger issues of the war—why it occurred, and what it achieved. Literary Critic Edmund Wilson. 67, returns to the more troubling questions of the Civil War in a book that at first glance hardly seems history. Omitting the usual battle data, he threads together in haphazard chronology a series of essays on the literature of the war. Modestly keeping in the background, intruding only occasionally to make a judgment, he lets...