Emotions and War

This volume addresses the place of the emotions in literary representations of war across six centuries of European history. It challenges modern assumptions about the passions and feelings attending violent conflict in order to reveal the multifarious historical emotions and emotional histories of war.

“Each chapter usually focuses on a select work, generally poetry, letters, or specific authors. Impressive use has been made of this source material throughout, so that collectively the essays have drawn out a wide range of nuances, tropes, and emotional inflections … Ultimately, this collection explores emotions and war, regardless of what emotions may be evoked or wars fought or not, in a successful and very focused study that makes a useful contribution to history of emotions studies.” (Hilary Jane Locke, Parergon, Vo. 33 (1), 2016)

Prof. Andrew Lynch is the Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, specializing in medieval and early modern literatures of war and peace. Drs Stephanie Downes and Katrina O'Loughlin are Research Associates in the history of emotions, specializing in literary texts written during the conflict of the Hundred Years War, and in eighteenth-century women's, travel, and civil war writing, respectively.