War and American Literature Cambridge Themes in American Literature and Culture Series

This book examines representations of war throughout American literary history, providing a firm grounding in established criticism and opening up new lines of inquiry. Readers will find accessible yet sophisticated essays that lay out key questions and scholarship in the field. War and American Literature provides a comprehensive synthesis of the literature and scholarship of US war writing, illuminates how themes, texts, and authors resonate across time and wars, and provides multiple contexts in which texts and a war's literature can be framed. By focusing on American war writing, from the wars with the Native Americans and the Revolutionary War to the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this volume illuminates the unique role representations of war have in the US imagination.

Introduction Jennifer Haytock; Part I. Aspects of War in American Literature: 1. War and morality Ty Hawkins; 2. Propaganda for war from the revolution to the Vietnam war Nicholas J. Cull; 3. Representing soldiers Jennifer Haytock; 4. Bodies, injury, medicine Michael Zeitlin; 5. Veterans, trauma, afterwar Philip Beidler; 6. Mourning, elegy, memorialization from the Civil war to Vietnam Steven Trout; 7. On antiwar literature Lawrence Rosenwald; Part II. Cultural Moments and the American Literary Imagination: 8. Liberty, freedom, independence, and war James J. Gigantino II; 9. Indians, defeat, persistence, and resistance Tammy Wahpeconiah; 10. Civil war literature and memory Sarah E. Gardner; 11. African American literature, citizenship, and war, 1863-1932 David Davis; 12. World war I and cultural change in America Pearl James; 13. On the home fronts of two world wars Karsten Piep; 14. Patriotism, nationalism, globalism Jonathan Vincent; 15. The 'good war' script Diederik Oostdijk; 16. The Vietnam war and its legacy Mark A. Heberle; 17. The forever wars Stacey Peebles; Part III. New Lines of Inquiry: 18. War and queerness Eric Keenaghan; 19. War and disability studies John M. Kinder; 20. War and ecocriticism Laura Wright; 21. War and whiteness Roger Luckhurst; 22. War and posthumanism Tim Blackmore.

Jennifer Haytock is professor of English at SUNY Brockport. She has published At Home, At War: Domesticity and World War I in American Literature (2003) and the Routledge Introduction to American War Literature (2018) as well as works on twentieth-century American women writers. She is Brockport's 2019 winner of the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Scholarship.