War and Literature
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Description
"War was the first subject of literature; at times, war has been its only subject. In this volume, the contributors reflect on the uneasy yet symbiotic relations of war and writing, from medieval to modern literature. War writing emerges in multiple forms, celebratory and critical, awed and disgusted; the rhetoric of inexpressibility fights its own battle with the urgent necessity of representation, record and recognition. This is shown to be true even to the present day: whether mimetic or metaphorical, literature that concerns itself overtly or covertly with the real pressures of war continues to speak to issues of pressing significance, and to provide some clues to the intricate entwinement of war with contemporary life. Particular topics addressed include writings of and about the Crusades and battles during the Hundred Years War; Shakespeare's treatment of war; Auden's 'Journal of an Airman'; and War and Peace"-- publisher description.
Contents:
Acts of vengeance, acts of love : crusading violence in the twelfth century / Susanna A. Throop -- Peril, flight and the Sad Man : medieval theories of the body in battle / Katie L. Walter -- "Is this war?" : British fictions of emergency in the Hot Cold War / James Purdon -- Crossing the Rubicon : history, authority and civil war in twelfth-century England / Catherine A.M. Clarke -- "The reader myghte lamente" : the sieges of Calais (1346) and Rouen (1418) in chronicle, poem and play / Joanna Bellis -- Shakespeare's casus belly, or, Cormorant war, and the wasting of men on Shakespeare's stage / Andrew Zurcher -- Unnavigable kinship in a time of conflict : Loyalist calligraphies, sovereign power and the "muckle honor" of Elizabeth Murray Inman / Carol Watts -- Proclaiming the war news : Richard Caton Woodville and Herman Melville / Tom F. Wright -- A feeling for numbers : representing the scale of the war dead / Mary A. Favret -- The guilt of the noncombatant and W.H. Auden's "Journal of an airman" / Rachel Galvin -- Does Tolstoy's War and peace make modern war literature redundant? / Mark Rawlinson.
ISBN
978-1843843818
Publication Date
2014
Publisher
D.S. Brewer
City
Cambridge
Keywords
war in literature, war and literature, vengeance, love, crusading, Middle Ages, history
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature | History | Military History
Comments
Essays and studies ; 67