Kate McLoughlin

War writing is an ancient genre that continues to be of vital importance. Times of crisis push literature to its limits, requiring writers to exploit their expressive resources to the maximum in response to extreme events. This Companion focuses on British and American war writing, from Beowulf and Shakespeare to bloggers on the 'War on Terror'. Thirteen period-based chapters are complemented by five thematic chapters and two chapters charting influences. This uniquely wide range facilitates both local and comparative study. Each chapter is written by an expert in the field and includes suggestions for further reading. A chronology illustrates how key texts relate to major conflicts. The Companion also explores the latest theoretical thinking on war representation to give access to this developing area and to suggest new directions for research. In addition to students of literature, the volume will interest those working in war studies, history, and cultural studies.

The Cambridge Companion to War Writing

Have you ever been struck by the number of parties in Modernist literature? In The Modernist Party, internationally distinguished scholars explore the party both as a literary device and as a social setting in which the movement's creative values were dev

Modernist Party

Malin Lidström Brock

Best known to English-speaking audiences as the creator of the "Moomin" books, Tove Jansson was also a novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, painter, cartoonist and creator of picture-books. This title includes nineteen essays which discuss themes of artistic and personal identity, gender and sexuality, childhood and old age in Jansson's work.

Tove Jansson Rediscovered

Kate McLoughlin's Authoring War is an ambitious and pioneering study of war writing across all literary genres from earliest times to the present day. Examining a range of cultures, she brings wide reading and close rhetorical analysis to illuminate how writers have met the challenge of representing violence, chaos and loss. War gives rise to problems of epistemology, scale, space, time, language and logic. She emphasises the importance of form to an understanding of war literature and establishes connections across periods and cultures from Homer to the 'War on Terror'. Exciting new critical groupings arise in consequence, as Byron's Don Juan is read alongside Heller's Catch-22 and English Civil War poetry alongside Second World War letters. Innovative in its approach and inventive in its encyclopedic range, Authoring War will be indispensable to any discussion of war representation.

The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq

Authoring War

Illustrates how war veterans have been used in British literature since the 1790s to explore being, knowing and storytelling.

British Literature in the Age of Mass Warfare, 1790-2015

Veteran Poetics

Lara Feigel

Nancy Martin

War affects life writing and lives affect war writing. The traditional forms of life writing—memoir, biography, letters, diaries—buckle under the strain of war. War writing has fewer traditional forms but exists at a similar extreme. The eight chapters in this book, written by leading and up-and-coming scholars in the field, illuminate the creative innovations, improvisations, and implosions which happen when the demands of writing war and writing lives collide. Central to all is the question of authenticity: how can wars and lives be known and who can speak of them with authority? This volume has a generous chronological and generic range, beginning in the early 1800s and stretching to 21st-century texts, and covering letters, diaries, fiction, ‘fakeries’, poetry, biography, testimony, songs, objects, and digital media. The mix of authors is similarly varied: Thomas Hardy, W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Bowen rub shoulders with Yousif M. Qasmiyeh (a contemporary Palestinian poet), Farah Baker (a Gazan teenager) and the writers behind the pen-names Araki Yasusada and Jiri Kajanë. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.

Writing War, Writing Lives

This volume traces transitions in British literature from 1960 to 1980, illuminating a diverse range of authors, texts, genres and movements. It considers innovations in form, emergent identities, changes in attitudes, preoccupations and in the mind itself, local and regional developments, and shifts within the oeuvres of individual authors.

Kate McLoughlin

Books

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