Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature

The first reference to literary and cultural representations of war in 20th-century English & US literature and film. Covering the two World Wars, the Spanish Civil War, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the War on Terror, this Companion reveals the influence of modern wars on the imagination. These newly researched and innovative essays connect 'high' literary studies to the engagement of film and theatre with warfare, extensively covers the literary and cultural evaluation of the technologies of war and open the literary field to genre fiction. Divided into 5 sections: 20th-Century Wars and Their Literatures; Bodies, Behaviours, Cultures; The Cultural Impact of the Technologies of Modern War; The Spaces of Modern War & Genres of War Culture. Key Features: * All-new original essays commissioned from major critics and cultural historians. * Reflects the way war studies are currently being taught and researched: in the volume's approach, structure and breadth of coverage. * For scholars: core arguments and detailed research topics.* For students: Historically grounded topic- and genre-based essays, useful for studying the modern period and war modules.

This superbly edited collection reminds us-and we still do need reminding-that wars are not so much punctual interruptions of recent history as its continuous lived reality. The essays collected here make for compulsive reading, affirming the rich resources of the literary intelligence when confronted by the systematic degradation of the human. -- Professor Peter Nicholls, New York University A wonderfully wide-ranging set of inspected Anglophone encounters between twentieth-century military conflicts and modernity's aesthetic modes - writing, of course, but also radio, photos, movies. The stress on so many key historical and theoretical issues is always canny and convincing; especially on how aesthetic memorialisings of war get done, on the various topographies of war, on how race and pacifism play out, and perhaps most pertinently of all on the potent developments in death-dealing technologies. -- Professor Valentine Cunningham, Corpus Christi College, Oxford This superbly edited collection reminds us-and we still do need reminding-that wars are not so much punctual interruptions of recent history as its continuous lived reality. The essays collected here make for compulsive reading, affirming the rich resources of the literary intelligence when confronted by the systematic degradation of the human. A wonderfully wide-ranging set of inspected Anglophone encounters between twentieth-century military conflicts and modernity's aesthetic modes - writing, of course, but also radio, photos, movies. The stress on so many key historical and theoretical issues is always canny and convincing; especially on how aesthetic memorialisings of war get done, on the various topographies of war, on how race and pacifism play out, and perhaps most pertinently of all on the potent developments in death-dealing technologies.

Adam Piette is a Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarme, Proust, Joyce, Beckett and Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939-1945. His latest book, The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2009. Mark Rawlinson is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Leicester. He is the author of British Writing of the Second World War (OUP, 2000); of the Norton Critical Edition of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange and of Pat Barker (forthcoming from Palgrave).