War in Literature

A unique anthology of Kipling's war stories and poems, from the frontier wars of empire to the Boer War and the First World War.

"This terrific collection is a powerful antidote to the rewritten and re-imaged vision of the Vietnam War in American culture of the 1990s....An exceptionally valuable book with ample potential as a classroom text". -- H. Bruce Franklin

The First World War inspired a huge outpouring of writing, including many classic accounts of the horrors of the trenches, written by men. What has been less visible until now is the Wars impact upon women writers, whose experience was often very different from that of their male counterparts. This anthology brings together women's writing from across the world, covering every genre of writing about the War from the period 1914 to 1930. Letters, diary entries, reportage, and essays, as well as polemical texts in favour of, or in opposition to, the hostilities, offer an interesting counterpoint to the novels and short stories through which women sought to encompass the extremes of wartime life as they saw it. This anthology demonstrates how the Great War acted as a catalyst for women writers, enabling them to find a public voice and to assert their own attitude to social and moral issues.

The Great War stimulated a sudden growth in the novel industry, and the trauma of the war continued to reverberate through much of the fiction published in the years that followed its inglorious end. The essays in this volume, by a number of leading critics in the field, considers some of the best-known, and some of the least-known, women writers on whose work the war left its shadow. Ranging from Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and H.D. to Vernon Lee, Frances Bellerby, and Mary Butts, the contributors challenge current thinking about women's responses to the First World War and explore the differences between women writers of the period, thus questioning the very categorization of "women's writing."

Axelsson provides an overview of American military novels set between 1945 and 1962. These are novels informed and inspired by the conditions and background of postwar occupation, the Korean War, and the early phases of the Cold War. More than 120 narratives are considered and evaluated from a literary point of view and discussed in terms of their contribution to the understanding that period in American life and literature. Of the books considered, 27 are given extended treatment--they were selected as being representative of socio-literary phenomena.

The memory of the Algerian war (1954-1962) continues to haunt French society. Although part of a much wider process of decolonization, the conflict was so traumatic that it brought France to the verge of civil war. Philip Dine has written the first full-length survey in any language of the French fiction and film generated by the war, ranging from the writings of Camus to the cinema of Godard, and from the 1950s to the 1990s. Writers discussed include Camus, Etecherelli, Marie Cardinal, Genet, Millecam, Perec, and Jules Roy. Filmmakers covered include Godard, Ophuls, Varda, Schoendorffer, Marker, Resnais, and Demy. All quotations in French are accompanied by English translations.

War is a major theme in Shakespeare's plays. Aside from its dramatic appeal, it provided him with a context in which his characters, steeped in the ideals of chivalry, could discuss such concepts as honor, courage, patriotism, and justice. Well aware of the decline of chivalry in his own era, Shakespeare gave his characters lines calling for civilized behavior, mercy, humanitarian principles, and moral responsibility. In this remarkable new book, eminent legal scholar Theodor Meron looks at contemporary international humanitarian law and rules for the conduct of war through the lens of Shakespeare's plays and discerns chivalry's influence there. The book comes as a response to the question of whether the world has lost anything by having a system of law based on the Hague and Geneva conventions. Meron contends that, despite the foolishness and vanity of its most extreme manifestations, chivalry served as a customary law that restrained and humanized the conflicts of the generally chaotic and brutal Middle Ages. It had the advantage of resting on the sense that rules arise naturally out of societies, their armed forces, and their rulers on the basis of experience. Against a background of Medieval and Renaissance sources as well as Shakespeare's historical and dramatic settings, Meron considers the ways in which law, morality, conscience, and state necessity are deployed in Shakespeare's plays to promote a society in which soldiers behave humanely and leaders are held to high standards of civilized behavior. Thus he illustrates the literary genealogy of such modern international humanitarian concerns as the treatment of prisoners and of noncombatants and accountability for war crimes, showing that the chivalric legacy has not been lost entirely. Fresh and insightful, Bloody Constraint will interest scholars of international law, lovers of Shakespeare, and anyone interested in the history of war.

Monteath examines the international literature of the Spanish Civil War across the entire range of the political spectrum, from anarchism to nazism. Utilizing this approach he is able to highlight the extraordinary creative potential of a period in which political and aesthetic practice were almost inseparable.