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.
Author(s): Alex Houen; Jan-Melissa Schramm
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 304
City: New York
Cover
Sacrifice and Modern War Literature: From the Battle of Waterloo to the War on Terror
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Illustrations
Notes on the Contributors
Introduction: Sacrifice and Modern War Literature
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1: Wordsworth, Waterloo, and Sacrifice
2: The Crimean War and (Self-)Sacrifice in Mid-Victorian Fiction
THE CRIMEAN WAR IN THE BRITISH LITERARY IMAGINATION
ON THE HEROIC IN VICTORIAN HISTORY
CHARLES DICKENS AND (SELF-)SACRIFICE
3: The Indian Mutiny and the Blood of Sacrifice
4: The Poetics of American Civil War Sacrifice
5: Character, Sacrifice, and Scapegoats: Boer War Fiction
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6: Bare Death: The Failing Sacrifice of the First World War
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7: ‘Freely Proffered’?: The Deaths of Rupert Brooke and Julian Grenfell
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8: ‘A bit of shrapnel’: The Sigerson Shorters, the Hardys, Yeats, and the Easter Rising
9: The Penny’s Mighty Sacrifice: The Spanish Civil War and Left Poetics
10: The Motif of Sacrifice in the Literature and Culture of the Second World War
11: ‘It is the poems you have lost’: Poetry and Sacrifice during the Second World War
12: Sacrifice and the Inner Organs of the Cold-War Citizen
SAMUEL BECKETT’S TRILOGY, SARTRE, AND THE FRENCH COLD WAR
BUNKERS, BECKETT, BOWEN
COLD-WAR VICTIMHOOD AND NUCLEAR SACRIFICE: BENJAMIN, BALLARD, OLIVER
THE MIMETIC TRIANGLE AND HOMO SACER SCAPEGOAT: GIRARD AND AGAMBEN
13: The Vietnam War, American Remembering, and the Measure of Sacrifice, Fifty Years On
14: ‘Atrocities against his Sacred Poet’: The Orpheus Myth and the Poetry of the Northern Irish Troubles
15: Reckoning Sacrifice in ‘War on Terror’ Literature
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Afterword
Select Bibliography
PRIMARY SOURCES
SECONDARY SOURCES
General Index
