Sacrifice and Modern War Literature - The Battle of Waterloo to the War on Terror

Sacrifice and Modern War Literature is the first book to explore how writers from the early nineteenth century to the present have addressed the intimacy of sacrifice and war. It has been common for critics to argue that after the First World War many of the cultural and religious values associated with sacrifice have been increasingly rejected by writers and others. However, this volume shows that literature has continued to address how different conceptions of sacrifice have been invoked in times of war to convert losses into gains or ideals. While those conceptions have sometimes been rooted in a secular rationalism that values lost lives in terms of political or national victories, spiritual and religious conceptions of sacrifice are also still in evidence, as with the 'martyrdom operations' of jihadis fighting against the 'war on terror'.

Each chapter presents fresh insights into the literature of a particular conflict and the contributions explore major war writers including Wordsworth, Kipling, Ford Madox Ford, and Elizabeth Bowen, as well as lesser known authors such as Dora Sigerson, Richard Aldington, Thomas Kinsella, and Nadeem Aslam. The volume covers multiple genres including novels, poetry (particularly elegy and lyric), memoirs, and some films. The contributions address a rich array of topics related to wartime sacrifice including scapegoating, martyrdom, religious faith, tragedy, heroism, altruism, 'bare life', atonement, and redemption.

List of contents

• Introduction


• 1: Philip Shaw: Wordsworth, Waterloo, and Sacrifice


• 2: Jan-Melissa Schramm: 'I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy': The Crimean War and the 'Inspiration' of (Self-) Sacrifice in mid-Victorian Fiction


• 3: Christopher Herbert: The Indian Mutiny and the Blood of Sacrifice


• 4: Randall Fuller: The Poetics of American Civil War Sacrifice


• 5: Steve Attridge: Character, Sacrifice, and Scapegoats: Boer War Fiction


• 6: Vincent Sherry: Bare Death: The Failing Sacrifice of the Great War


• 7: Tim Kendall: 'Freely Proffered'?: The Deaths of Rupert Brooke and Julian Grenfell


• 8: Matthew Campbell: 'A bit of shrapnel': The Sigerson Shorters, the Hardys, Yeats and the Easter Rising


• 9: Ian Patterson: The Penny's Mighty Sacrifice: The Spanish Civil War and Left Poetics


• 10: Mark Rawlinson: The Motif of Sacrifice in the Literature and Culture of the Second World War


• 11: Helen Goethals: 'It is the poems you have lost': Poetry and Sacrifice during the Second World War


• 12: Adam Piette: Sacrifice and the Inner Organs of the Cold War Citizen


• 13: Philip Beidler: The Vietnam War, American Remembering, and the Measure of Sacrifice, Fifty Years Later


• 14: David Wheatley: 'Atrocities Against His Sacred Poet': The Orpheus Myth and the Poetry of the Northern Irish Troubles


• 15: Alex Houen: Reckoning Sacrifice in 'War on Terror' Literature

About the author

Alex Houen is a University Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature in the Faculty of English, and Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford University Press, 2002), editor of States of War since 9/11: Terrorism, Sovereignty, and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2014), and co-editor (with Dominic Janes) of Martyrdom and Terrorism: Pre-Modern to Contemporary Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2014). He also co-edits (with Adam Piette) the international poetry journal Blackbox Manifold.

Jan-Melissa Schramm is a University Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature in the Faculty of English, and Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge. She is the author of Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Censorship, Dramatic Form, and the Representation of the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century England (forthcoming), and co-editor of Fictions of Knowledge: Fact, Evidence, Doubt (Macmillan, 2011).

Summary

This book explores how writers from the early nineteenth century to the present have addressed the intimacy of sacrifice and war. Each chapter presents fresh insights into the literature of a particular conflict. The range of literature examined complements the rich array of topics related to wartime sacrifice that the contributors discuss.

Additional text

This rich collection ranges over two hundred years of predominantly British military history and war writing to consider which languages, symbols, and forms of sacrifice have operated to explain, rationalize, or critique war violence ... a clear picture emerges of the contradictions within imperial rhetoric and a stringent critique of British policy from within, even at times by those held to be enthusiasts of empire.

Report

This rich collection ranges over two hundred years of predominantly British military history and war writing to consider which languages, symbols, and forms of sacrifice have operated to explain, rationalize, or critique war violence ... a clear picture emerges of the contradictions within imperial rhetoric and a stringent critique of British policy from within, even at times by those held to be enthusiasts of empire. Holly Furneaux, Modern Philology

Product details

• Authors: Alex Houen, Alex (University Senior Lecturer Houen
• Assisted by: Alex Houen (Editor), Alex (University Senior Lecturer Houen (Editor), Jan-Melissa Schramm (Editor), Jan-Melissa (University Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature Schramm (Editor)
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 12.07.2018
• EAN: 9780198806516
• ISBN: 978-0-19-880651-6
• No. of pages: 304
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous