Author: Peter S. Kindsvatter
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480
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Book Description
Some warriors are drawn to the thrill of combat and find it the defining moment of their lives. Others fall victim to fear, exhaustion, impaired reasoning and despair. This book synthesizes the wartime experiences of American soldiers, from the doughboys of World War I to the grunts of Vietnam. Focusing on both soldiers and marines, it draws on histories and memoirs, oral histories, psychological and sociological studies and even fiction to show that their experiences remain fundamentally the same regardless of the enemy, terrain, training or weaponry.
Author: Stephen McVeigh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135964653
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218
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Book Description
This book is an innovative collection of original research which analyzes the many varieties of post-conflict masculinity. Exploring topics such as physical disability and psychological trauma, and masculinity and sexuality in relation to the "feminizing" contexts of wounding and desertion, this volume draws together leading academics in the fields of gender, history, literature, and disability studies, in an inter- and multi-disciplinary exploration of the conditions and circumstances that men face in the aftermath of war.
Author: Cynthia Wachtell
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807145645
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
Until now, scholars have portrayed America's antiwar literature as an outgrowth of World War I, manifested in the works of writers such as Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. But in War No More, Cynthia Wachtell corrects the record by tracing the steady and inexorable rise of antiwar writing in American literature from the Civil War to the eve of World War I. Beginning with an examination of three very different renderings of the chaotic Battle of Chickamauga -- a diary entry by a northern infantry officer, a poem romanticizing war authored by a young southerner a few months later, and a gruesome story penned by the veteran Ambrose Bierce -- Wachtell traces the gradual shift in the late nineteenth century away from highly idealized depictions of the Civil War. Even as the war was under way, she shows, certain writers -- including Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, John William De Forest, and Nathaniel Hawthorne -- quietly questioned the meaning and morality of the conflict. As Wachtell demonstrates, antiwar writing made steady gains in public acceptance and popularity in the final years of the nineteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth, especially during the Spanish-American War and the war in the Philippines. While much of the era's war writing continued the long tradition of glorifying battle, works by Bierce, Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, William James, and others increasingly presented war as immoral and the modernization and mechanization of combat as something to be deeply feared. Wachtell also explores, through the works of Theodore Roosevelt and others, the resistance that the antiwar impulse met. Drawing upon a wide range of published and unpublished sources, including letters, diaries, essays, poems, short stories, novels, memoirs, speeches, magazine and newspaper articles, and religious tracts, Wachtell makes strikingly clear that pacifism had never been more popular than in the years preceding World War I. War No More concludes by charting the development of antiwar literature from World War I to the present, thus offering the first comprehensive overview of one hundred and fifty years of American antiwar writing.
Author: Jonathan E. Vincent
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190466669
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
The Health of the State is a cultural history that explores how war writing figured in three phases of modern America's political evolution: Civil War remembrance during the Progressive Era, the culture of World War I and the new internationalism, and World War II's legitimation of Cold War liberalism.
Author: Jennifer Anne Haytock
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 0814209327
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 176
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Book Description
This study demonstrates that such literary divisions as war novel and domestic novel limit readers' understanding of the ways these categories rely on and respond to each other. Haytock argues that gender creates an ideological context through which both domesticity and war are viewed and understood; issues of home and violence are intricately related for U.S. authors who wrote about the First World War. Haytock explores what war and domestic texts represent in light of the deconstructionist said in its cultural and historical context and seeing what is not said. Readers take food, shelter, and clothing for granted, and yet the way we treat them is part of what allows us to define ourselves as civilized. In war novels and domestic novels by Temple Beiley, Ellen, Glasgow, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, John Dos Passons, Thomas Boyd, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty, the idea of home and domestic rituals contribute to the creation of war propaganda, the soldier's experience of war, and the home front's ability to confront the war after the fact. This approach helps literary criticism reject the separation of men's and women's writing, particularly but not only their writing about war.
Author: Milton A. Cohen
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 194997975X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
A study of political themes in American World War II novels from 1945 to 1975, including rebellion against military authority, treatment of minorities, future projections and retrospective interpretations of the war.
Author: Martin Löschnigg
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311039152X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 528
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Book Description
The twenty-seven original contributions to this volume investigate the ways in which the First World War has been commemorated and represented internationally in prose fiction, drama, film, docudrama and comics from the 1960s until the present. The volume thus provides a comprehensive survey of the cultural memory of the war as reflected in various media across national cultures, addressing the complex connections between the cultural post-memory of the war and its mediation. In four sections, the essays investigate (1) the cultural legacy of the Great War (including its mythology and iconography); (2) the implications of different forms and media for representing the war; (3) ‘national’ memories, foregrounding the differences in post-memory representations and interpretations of the Great War, and (4) representations of the Great War within larger temporal or spatial frameworks, focusing specifically on the ideological dimensions of its ‘remembrance’ in historical, socio-political, gender-oriented, and post-colonial contexts.
Author: Karsten Helge Piep
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042025204
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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Book Description
Embattled Home Fronts is an inquiry into the highly conflicted US American experience of World War I as it plays itself out in the diverse body of novelistic works to which it has given rise and by which it has been, in turn, shaped and commemorated. As such, this book naturally concerns itself with the formal aspects of artistic war representation. But rather than merely endeavoring to illustrate how American writers from various backgrounds chose to depict World War I, the present work seeks to uncover the particular ideologies and political practices that inform these representational choices. To this end, Embattled Home Fronts examines both canonized and marginalized US American World War I novels within the context of contemporaneous debates over shifting class, gender, and race relations. The book contends that American literary representations of the Great War are shaped less by universal insights into modern society's self-destructiveness than by concerted efforts to fashion class-, gender-, and race-specific experiences of warfare in ways that stabilize and heighten political group identities. In moving beyond the customary focus on ironic war representations, Embattled Home Fronts illustrates that the representational and ideological battles fought within American World War I literature not only shed light on the emergence of powerful identity-political concepts such as the New Woman and the New Negro, but also speak to the reappearance of utopian, communitarian, and social protest fictions in the early 1930s. This study Embattled Home Fronts provides a new understanding of the relationship between war literature and home front politics that should be of interest to students and scholars working from a variety of disciplines and perspectives
Author: Andrew J. Huebner
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807868213
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
Images of war saturated American culture between the 1940s and the 1970s, as U.S. troops marched off to battle in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Exploring representations of servicemen in the popular press, government propaganda, museum exhibits, literature, film, and television, Andrew Huebner traces the evolution of a storied American icon--the combat soldier. Huebner challenges the pervasive assumption that Vietnam brought drastic changes in portrayals of the American warrior, with the jaded serviceman of the 1960s and 1970s shown in stark contrast to the patriotic citizen-soldier of World War II. In fact, Huebner shows, cracks began to appear in sentimental images of the military late in World War II and were particularly apparent during the Korean conflict. Journalists, filmmakers, novelists, and poets increasingly portrayed the steep costs of combat, depicting soldiers who were harmed rather than hardened by war, isolated from rather than supported by their military leadership and American society. Across all three wars, Huebner argues, the warrior image conveyed a growing cynicism about armed conflict, the federal government, and Cold War militarization.
Author: Sarah Trott
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496808673
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 243
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Book Description
The conflation of the hard-boiled style and war experience has influenced many contemporary crime writers, particularly in the traumatic aftermath of the Vietnam War. Yet, earlier writers in the genre, such as Raymond Chandler, remain overlooked when it comes to examining how their war experience affected their writing. Sarah Trott corrects this oversight by examining Chandler alongside the World War I writers of the Lost Generation as well as highlighting a melding of very different styles in Chandler's work. Based on Chandler's experience in combat, Trott explains that the writer created detective Philip Marlowe not as the idealization of heroic individualism, as is commonly perceived, but instead as an authentic individual subjected to very real psychological frailties from trauma during the First World War. Inspecting Chandler's work and correspondence indicates that the characterization of the fictional Marlowe goes beyond the traditional chivalric readings and can instead be interpreted as a genuine representation of a traumatized veteran in American society. Substituting the horror of the trenches for the corruption of the city, Chandler formed a disillusioned protagonist in an uncaring America. Chandler did so with the sophistication necessary to straddle genre fiction and canonical literature. The sum of this work offers a new understanding of how Chandler uses his war trauma, how that experience established the traditional archetype of detective fiction, and how this reading of his fiction enables Chandler to transcend generic limitations and be recognized as a key twentieth-century literary figure.
