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Zahra Husayni's war memoir Da (2008) is widely recognized as one of the most successful productions of Hawzah-yi Hunari's Holy Defence oral history project. Focusing on this work and by using a combination of paratextual analysis and close reading, the present article explores the dynamics of meaning-making as a contested phenomenon within the propagandist messaging of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The analysis hinges on the fact that despite the official promotion of this memoir as a tribute to the mothers of martyrs of the Iran-Iraq War, the narratives of these mothers are surprisingly marginalized within the text. Approaching the Holy Defence discourse as a Lyotardian grand narrative, this article raises the question whether in light of this discrepancy, a counter-discursive reading of Da is possible. Exploring this question provides insight into the construction and propagation of meaning in the Holy Defence war memoirs industry in Iran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), which the Iranian government frames as a 'Sacred Defense', occupies a large space in contemporary Persian fiction, sometimes in surprising ways. This article focuses on the 2017 novel Haras (Pruning) by Nasim Marashi (Nasīm Marʿashī), which despite being shaped entirely by the context of the Iran-Iraq War rarely treats the experience of living through it. The article explores how Haras builds on previous works that use the war not as a focal point, like conventional war literature, but a point of departure to explore different stories about post-war Iran, intricately connected to, yet far beyond, the war with Iraq. The article postulates that by using the war with Iraq to call attention to the loss of people, homes, and the environment, Haras uses the war to innovatively challenge the messaging of the Islamic Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay takes up Gertrude Stein's war writing, her autobiographical Wars I Have Seen and later play Yes Is for a Very Young Man, in several registers. The first is Stein's record of her experience of the war itself toward the moment of liberation of her village by American troops on 1 September 1944. For Stein, this was the "Zero Hour" of liberation and new beginning—but also the end of unfreedom and compromise with the dark history of the Vichy Regime. In her third experimental autobiography, Stein reverses the form of the "continuous present" of The Making of Americans while including a wide range of historical references and personal reflections. The resulting construction of a "historical present," while written on a historical timeline,plays with conventional beginnings, middles, and ends. Stein's first reflections on war associate it with developmental stages of childhood, creating a ludic and a-rational account of war that allows her to distance herself from her earlier support of Marshall Pétain. The "middles" of her narrative describe the structural framework of surviving the war and the limited means for comprehending it as a present "unreality." With the coming of Americans, its "end," unreality becomes real and Stein's narrative steps into the light of freedom associated with American democracy—and a new moment of media celebrity. In this historical limelight, she writes her only "realist" play, Yes Is for a Very Young Man, based on the contradictions of living within the Occupation, a vacillation between Collaboration and Resistance projected onto her characters. Stein thus fashions an historical allegory to explain to audiences at home the complexities of Occupation from her post-Zero Hour moment of triumphant Americanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The poet Tony Harrison has created work for the stage and television, and even assumed the role of poet/journalist, writing newspaper reports in verse from war-torn Bosnia. His work is underpinned by a belief in the political nature of the act of writing. He has generally attracted a non-working-class readership; nevertheless, he has never abandoned his quest for a 'democratic' poetry. Much of his work has taken the form of a poetry of immediate response to current events. He has also been insistent, at times, on where his poetry should be published. When he wrote 'Initial Illumination' for The Guardian, for example, he argued it should not appear in the 'literary' section, but on the news pages. Harrison sees himself as a 'war poet. He uses his position as a public intellectual to engage in a struggle against dominant discourses and ways of seeing and to bring audiences to confront the horror of war. The article focuses in particular on his Gulf War poem, 'A Cold Coming', in which he uses strategies such as ekphrasis, to position the reader as a kind of 'secondary witness' of a war that had been turned by the media into a distant, anaesthetised spectacle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how borders are negotiated in Lola Arias' Minefield/Campo Minado (2016). Arias' representation of the war experiences and traumatic memories of six veterans, three from each side of the Malvinas/Falklands war, suggests an effort to reframe fixed categorizations around the conflict and cross temporal, spatial and aesthetic borders. We will study the articulation of these borders as devices for verbalizing the continuities and discontinuities between "fact" and "fiction" and "self" and "other" in an attempt to assess how the play constructively manages the anxiety arising from the urge to tell and the need to forget experienced by war veterans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the representation of traitor as a figure of betrayal in Etel Adnan's novel "Sitt Marie-Rose," focusing on how a woman brings out group cohesion and belonging during war. It examines the novel's gendered critique of filiation through its affiliation with a figure of otherness, the Palestinian refugee. It argues on the fragility of brotherhood in the novel, as well as on the political suspicion and anxiety tied to a woman within a male group due to patriarchal nationalism.

American-Iraqi writer Sinan Antoon's latest Arabic-language novel Fihris (2016), meaning 'index' or 'catalogue', is ostensibly the story of an academic, Namir, who returns to Baghdad as a translator for a documentary film company and Wadoud, an eccentric Baghdadi bookseller who is devoting his life to compiling a massive, unabridged history of Iraq's 2003 war. Namir's encounter with Wadoud in his shop leads to a representation of the Iraq's macrocosmic polarities at every level. The leitmotifs of unending internal and external conflicting dualities amid the all-pervading insanity of war, violence and brutality form the backbone of a plotless story, whose language, style and structure is founded on themes of exile, memory, madness, time and trauma. This critique seeks to deconstruct the author's creative tapestry of the two protagonists, their parallel worlds and their ultimate unification as one surreal spirit pointing to new hope for Iraq's postwar future as one nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented which explores Caroline Marsdale's story "Cousin Jack," published in the December 1873 issue of "Southern Magazine," which focused on Louisiana in the American Civil War. Topics discussed include the publication of Civil War narratives by the magazine, the process of Reconstruction in Louisiana following the war, and the interpretation of the literary references highlighted by Marsdale.

The article explores the depiction of African American soldiers, the War of 1812, and the 1815 Battle of New Orleans in the 1900 historical fiction "Esteve, the Soldier Boy," by African American author Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Topics discussed include the leadership of then U.S. Army General Andrew Jackson in the Battle of New Orleans, the representation of the heroism of soldiers of color in the short story, and the use of fiction to reconstruct the wartime service of said soldiers.

Patrick Brontë's Winter-evening Thoughts (1810) is thought to have been published in response to a national day of fasting and humiliation held on 28 February 1810. The rhetoric of national humiliation which Brontë employs can also be detected in fast-day sermons and war poetry published during the Peninsular War (1808–1814). This essay argues that the annual, systematic practice of national fast days throughout the Napoleonic Wars encouraged schematic modes of imagining and representing war. Literary traces of this ideological framework of nationalism are evident in the use of particular rhetorical devices which connect individual and nation, and language that is often biblical or eschatological. By highlighting these devices in a period that was thoroughly immersed in the ideology and practice of national humiliation, this essay expands on existing scholarship of national humiliation and Romantic literature with the aim of facilitating textual analysis in other periods in which national humiliation has been practiced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the fascination of American author Rebecca Harding Davis in wartime stories particularly the American Civil War. Topics discussed include the highlights of her essay "The Mean Face of War," published in an 1899 issue of "The Independent" journal, the way she criticized the behavior of Civil War soldiers in her 1904 memoir "Bits of Gossip," and the way the characters in her stories tend to have a moral status linked to various objects during the war.

This article examines the origins of the Chinese seductress-spy to further existing literature on women and war, female archetypes and espionage in China. The diffusion of knowledge about women such as Mata Hari from the West to Republican China (1911–1949) developed a new female archetype that was neither Chinese nor Western, but both Chinese and Western. Instead of seeing Chinese seductress-spies as equivalent to their Western counterparts, we should see them as a uniquely gendered nationalist construct that had roots in the Japanese, English, as well as Chinese understanding of the role of women during wartime situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sympathizer is a theoretically sophisticated response to the narratives concerning the Vietnam War in the context of U.S. imperialism through the wars in Iraqi, Afghanistan, and the context of more currently terrorist attacks. What Viet Thanh Nguyen has undertaken in this fierce and bold debut is not an attempt at an authentic delineation of the war in Viet Nam, but a critical reflection on the knowledge production regarding the Vietnam War in particular, and all the other wars in general. With an ambitious and disturbing gesture, The Sympathizer confronts the "frames of war" and endeavors to circulate beyond the limits of the "frames" in order to shed light on an unresolved entanglement encoded in the war narratives. By stitching together conflicting voices and standpoints, The Sympathizer makes visible a complex web of war narratives and the ill-conceived logic that previously undiagnosed. This essay eventually discusses the way in which Nguyen's post-Apocalyptic sentiments give The Sympathizer an intricate touch and a narrative reenactment that echoes the practice of pacificism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the theme of the military in the writings of Giovanni Verga in order to show its continued importance, and to shed new light on the cultural dimension of conscription and war in the literature of post-Unification and Liberal Italy. While Verga's engagement with the military has not received much attention in scholarship thus far, or has been overshadowed by aspects of war itself, this study focuses on Verga's portrayal of military experience to analyse his multi-layered literary development. This study brings out the author's ambivalent attitude towards progress at this time of complex transformations in Italy marked by ambitions to become a modern nation state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Helen Maria Williams’s Ode on the Peace, written on the occasion of the 1783 Peace of Paris (which officially ended the War of American Independence), considers two fundamental questions: how should the end of war be understood? and how should the arrival of peace be represented? Active in London Dissenting circles, Williams witnessed the hard work, letter-writing campaigns, and political petitioning that lay behind the 1783 treaty. In this essay, I argue that Williams knew that peace does not come merely when the war machines are exhausted, but is an achievement that must be earned, and crucial to her ode is her sense that this work is not over, for peace is not a mysterious visitation but a habit of life, one that writers have a responsibility to teach to readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

War names are a prominent feature in the child soldier narrative, a genre of literary writing mostly associated with Africa. They have several narratological functions; they act as unique identifiers, signal their statuses as combatants, and so on. Moreover, characters who use war names often reflect upon their significance as inspirational, aspirational, representative of how they want to be perceived by others and even a source of “hidden power” that improves their effectiveness as soldiers. The adoption of a war name is a complex process regulated by informal rules that yield diverse examples. And in some cases contextual information from within a narrative and the historical circumstances on which names are based provide a rich source of characterisation for characters who may otherwise serve limited roles in their respective texts. I examine this unique process to show that these names reveal much about the characters and the brutal conditions in which they operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reads Mozambican author Mia Couto’sSleepwalking Land,Under the FrangipaniandThe Last Flight of the Flamingoas a triptych. This reading is based on the understanding that each of the texts reference distinct, yet connected, moments along Mozambique’s journey from civil war to peace and reconstruction. It argues that in these texts, Couto is constantly trying to find new ways in which Mozambique’s wars can be written so the destruction they represent can be recuperated and a new Mozambique imagined. Central to this attempted recuperation is his textual return to the events of the civil war in texts that have specific post-war settings, thus allowing for the effects of that war to be reinterpreted according to socio-historical imperatives that have only become apparent in the years after the advent of peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Ulrich Beck theorised a ‘Risk Society’ (Risikogesellschaft) in 1986, the threat of global annihilation through nuclear war remained uppermost in the minds of his readership. If we skip forward three decades to the contemporary moment, the question we ask in this special issue is whether the sensation of risk has mutated or evolved in the intervening period and whether fiction exhibits evidence of such a change. While the immediate risk of the Cold War’s ‘mutually assured destruction’ through World War Three seems to have ebbed, the paradox is that the social goal of safety and security seems not to have drawn any closer. Global financial collapse, Islamic terrorism, human-authored climate change, epidemic disease outbreaks, refugee crises and the chronic erosion of the welfare state now preoccupy those in the developed world and provide the horizons for our anxieties. These concerns run through contemporary fiction and are analysed in the essays in this special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since 2005, Iranian writer and veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, Ahmad Dehqan, has emerged as one of the most well-known writers of fiction based on that war. War fiction in Iran (as well as other forms of cultural production about the war) generally has adhered to the official narrative of ‘Sacred Defense,’ which the Islamic Republic has promoted. The state also has been, and continues to be, the chief supporter of cultural production dealing with the war, particularly through institutions such as the Howzeh-ye Honari (Islamic Arts Center). Ahmad Dehqan is one such writer who is affiliated with the state. His fiction, however, particularly his novel Safar beh garā-ye devist va haftād darajeh (Journey to Heading 270 Degrees) and short story collection, Man qātel-e pesar-tān hastam (I Killed Your Son), not only fail to adhere to the norms of Sacred Defense fiction, but in many ways, attempt to undermine it. By focusing on two of Dehqan’s short stories from the collection I Killed Your Son, this article argues that his fiction mines the recent past to challenge the authority of the Sacred Defense narrative by rewriting aspects of stories that took place during the war. In doing so, he reasserts the unsettled nature of the war narrative today in Iranian society and the continued interest and importance of the war. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After the end of the Cold War, the second world disappeared, and the post-socialist space became a silent non-region. A close look at representations of pre-war Afghanistan and more specifically representations of its socialist period in contemporary global Anglophone literature reveals a cartography of silences and evasions related to the difficulty of depicting socialism outside of the discourses of its historical failure. At the same time, examining and explicitly addressing these impasses presents a wealth of new possibilities for representation and articulation. In this paper, I discuss representations of the Soviet invasion in three Anglophone novels – Khaled Hosseini’sThe Kite Runner,M.E. Hirsh’sKabul,and Nadeem Aslam’sThe Wasted Vigil. These three texts, I argue, exemplify three divergent strategies of imagining Afghanistan’s past, and consequently offer a path towards imagining its future as well as the future of the globe. I argue that representations of the Soviet invasion of 1979 serve as a pivotal lens through which the global community of readers is asked to understand the role of the US in contemporary geopolitical configurations, interpret the legacy of the Cold War, and evaluate the viability of alternative political projects in the twenty-first century – that is, it signals the way in which we make sense of our collective future. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay engages the world of the nineteenth-century naval novel, considering how the ‘wooden world’ presented in such narratives came to shape a unique representational order. Taking Captain Frederick Marryat’sThe King’s Own(1830) as primary evidence, it is argued that naval novels depict the man-of-war as a place where the things – and men – of the parlour and marketplace find themselves reconstituted as components of the ‘Service’. This alternate order emerges in one of the most exhilarating features of high-seas thrillers: their recurrence to dense, largely un-translated nautical terminology. Such language foregrounds the man-of-war as a purely functional assemblage of parts, inviting the subject to die and become reborn as an object of state. At one level, this project was distinctly British. At the same time, the British fixation on naval gadgetry resonates with American and French naval novels of the period, cooperating in what arguably became a transnational militarism. Such narratives prepare the way for a modern ideological strategy by which warfare becomes ennobled on the basis of its economic sanctity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly interest in the interwar debate on the origins of the Great War has focused on the role played by historians and decision-makers, which eventually settled into a revisionist consensus stressing collective responsibility. This article reexamines the role played by British journalists in the early political debate on the origins of the war, recapturing the interpretations of journalists, editors, and political commentators after World War I. Through postwar memoirs, books centered on the origins of the war, essays, and other writings, many of the most prominent British journalists focused on making the case for German war guilt after 1914. In doing so, they mostly worked to support the official judgment of the Versailles Peace Treaty against revisionist historians and opinion in Britain and abroad. The interpretation developed by British journalists in this period thus served as a direct counterfoil to the revisionist consensus of this period and continues to resonate even up to the present day among those who see World War I as Britain's “good war.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the reception ofIm Westen nichts Neues[All Quiet on the Western Front], from its release in November 1928 to December 1930. Erich Maria Remarque's “novel”, which had been reworked and de-politicized by the author himself before being released as a documentary without “tendency”, provided a new perspective on the war—the non-literary perspective of an ordinary soldier. Ullstein, the publishers, shaped the reception of the text and took it out of the literary discourse as a novel and integrated it into the Weimar discourse of war literature. The resulting controversy, especially on the text's “truth” in giving an “authentic” representation of the war, mirrored and demonstrated the expectations which the critics had of war literature in general and which they used to evaluate this work. But the discussion ofIm Westen nichts Neuesalso makes clear that the given criteria of war literature depend on the context, not the text itself. The “truth” of representation depends on those “true” descriptions of war which have been produced and established beforehand. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents two case studies of the civic press (Glasgow and Newcastle upon Tyne) to show how the climate of local news production in the 1920s and 1930s encouraged the construction of a particular genre of war memory. It demonstrates how, and why, a collection of diverse representations that shared key characteristics—what this article has termed “military memory”—became a regular part of local newspaper content. Unlike other public discourses that centred on the War's central meaning, or cultural texts that increasingly foregrounded the War Experience, “military memory” approached the Great War via its military components, recalling specific episodes of martial action. Like the vision of civic life broadly disseminated through the pages of the press during this time, “military memory” validated achievement, praised effort, and was thus little troubled by the ripples or waves of disillusionment or doubt as to the worth of the enterprise that emanated from other public discourses. Forged during a time of civic creativity, and local press vitality, this way of remembering the war had undoubted societal reach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Historians of Africa have frequently claimed that the violence of colonial conquest, and the slaughter of fauna that accompanied it, was reproduced in the repression of anti-colonial and nationalist insurgencies. Indeed the vocabularies of hunting, tracking and killing often seeped into the practices of counter-insurgencies. Using interviews, archives, and most of all the sizeable body of memoirs and novels by former Rhodesian soldiers, this article argues that the hunting of African animals and the hunting of African insurgents were markedly different. Animals were natural; they were innocent and instinctive, as were African trackers in government employment: they should not be hunted. The Africans who should be hunted were not the enemy, however, but allies and would-be allies who became prey. Thus the conduct of late twentieth century counter-insurgency was markedly different from that of nineteenth century hunting even as it reclassified prey and protected species as hunters did. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joseph Heller'sCatch-22(1961) is considered one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century. It was a massive bestseller that sold over 10 million copies, and it introduced a new phrase into the English language for an unsolvable conundrum or paradox.Catch-22was groundbreaking because it was the first broadly successful American novel that offered a post-modern, satirical take on the Second World War. Ostensibly the novel had nothing whatsoever Jewish about it beyond the ethnicity of its author. Instead it was about the Assyrian/Armenian protagonist, Yossarian, a USAAF bombardier in the European theatre. As I will argue, while outwardly the novel aims to represent the war and the protagonist, Yossarian, as American rather than Jewish, the work is, in fact, packed with signs that it is about a Jewish airman confronting the Holocaust. Heller's attempt to hide this was part of a tradition established by Jewish authors in the post-war years who sought to distance themselves from their ethnicity in order to speak to “universal” themes of rebellion. However, to overlook the “Jewish” semiotics ofCatch-22is to miss many of its major themes. I am thus offering a reading of the novel that will delineate what it tells us about the post-war Jewish life in America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's insights on poems which center on war times in Guam, the southernmost island of the Mariana archipelago. Two poems are presented such as "During Your Lifetime" which is addressed to the author's grandmother who witnessed the country survive war and the impacts of militarism, and "Scorched Earth" which is addressed to the U.S. military force in the Marianas.

Historical and literary critical orthodoxies hold that unfavourable British literary responses to the First World War did not materialise untilJourney’s Endand the war-books controversy of 1930. What appears to have happened is that an initial and largely factitious 1930 newspaper controversy has been conflated artificially with artefacts of popular culture from the 1960s to create a linear historical narrative of popular misrepresentation. A review of war fiction and memoir in English published prior to 1929 shows this narrative to be entirely unhistorical: considerable numbers of unfavourable responses to the First World War exist in British writing from this earlier period. The argument that there was a spell of post-war optimism before the general public changed its mind in 1929 is impossible to sustain. There never was a unitary British narrative of the First World War, and if the general perception of it by the British people since 1929 has been negative, the explanation does not lie in Depression-era war books but in whatever caused readers and reviewers of the time to respond favourably to individual accounts of the war rather than to a patriotic gloss. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay focuses on May Sinclair'sA Journal of Impressions of Belgium(1915, London: MacMillan), Mary Roberts Rinehart'sKings, Queens and Pawns: An American Woman at the Front(1915, New York: George Doran Company) and Edith Wharton'sFighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort(2010, London: Hesperus Press Limited), and examines how these writers reflected and negotiated in their writing their status as eyewitnesses to the First World War. In a male-dominated world, the presence of women writers at the front was unusual. These three authors wrote about their condition as ‘other’ in a world that had been traditionally secluded for them, and had to negotiate the strategies they would resort in order to portray the conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the English author and historian Lucy Hutchinson's views on the fall of the Stuart monarchy and the First Bishop's War in 1639, the Secnd Bishop's War in 1640 and the war with Ireland in 1641. Topics discussed include the history of civil war in North and East Midlands, the depiction of the civi war by Margaret Cavendish and Sir John Gell, and the administration of the war between 1643 and 1644.

This article explores structural reasons for the “archival turn” performed in the civil war novels of Lebanon's second-generation post-war novelists since the early 2000s. It recognizes the abundant use of precise spatial and temporal references, which contrasts with the practice of Lebanese writers of the 1990s, and explains this change as the result of the authors’ socio-economic position and their position in the literary field. The post-civil war novel thus appears as the memorial practice of a closely circumscribed, largely secular intellectual elite who are excluded from sectarian war narratives as means to make sense of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The theme of the Lebanese civil war is very present in the works of several francophone Lebanese novelists. In this article, I propose first an analysis of a short story and a novel by Andrée Chedid to identify how the author illustrated and exceeded the war in an educational objective. Nevertheless, the theme of the Lebanese war is not the prerogative of Lebanese writers only. Therefore, I compare the vision of Chedid with that of Quebec writer Michèle Marineau in her novelLa Route de Chlifa(Montréal: Éditions Québec/Amérique, Collection Littérature jeunesse, 1992), which describes the Lebanese war and its consequences including migration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As one of the major tendencies of post-war novelistic production, the “Lebanese war novel”consists of staging individual stories in relation to the collective events, and in order to achieve this mobilizing paradigms of narrative and memory. How does History, as material of writing, become the location of a historiography of war? This article seeks to answer these questions by examining texts by novelists of different generations who write in different languages, through questioning their narrative formulation, then the issues of identity and aesthetics stakes around this corpus is examined. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Nicholas Royle suggested in a 2004 review that literary outsider 'Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912-64) has for too long been one of those writers more talked about than read'. Little seems to have changed in the intervening decade, the passing of the author's centenary having been marked by several small events that contributed to what Royle termed the 'expanding mythology' around Maclaren-Ross, but seemingly inspiring little critical interest in his writings. This article seeks to redress the balance, utilizing the wealth of biographical material produced on Maclaren-Ross since his death in 1964, in a detailed reading of his wartime prose. Taking as its starting point the dichotomy between Maclaren-Ross's dandified appearance and his aggressive heterosexuality, it resituates Maclaren-Ross-and, more importantly, his Second-World-War writings-within an emerging Queer Studies predicated upon the understanding that, whilst many homosexuals are, in their everyday behaviour, not queer people at all, 'many heterosexuals are extremely queer'. In his peculiar attentiveness to clothing on as off the page, this article contends, Maclaren-Ross demonstrates an understanding, advanced for its time, of the performative power of dress, its ability to queer a society's response to a given wearer, or group of wearers, and in so doing to betray the prejudices of that society, prejudices exacerbated by the exigencies of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early twentieth-century writing abundantly employs the combined metaphor of tempests and shipwrecks at sea, which is often applied to the Great War. Of special interest are those instances where the metaphor occurs in conjunction with Shakespeare, his work, and his afterlife. On the one hand, this practice reveals the ease with which Shakespeare's work could be applied to the unprecedented events of world history. On the other hand, the storm and shipwreck metaphor also brings into focus the challenge to Shakespeare's reputation during the wartime years. However, innovations in teaching and the modernist tendency to quote from the early modern canon ultimately guarantee the continued popularity of the playwright and poet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first conceptual, theoretical treatises about small war (la petite guerre) as special operations appeared only from the middle of the seventeenth century. The term is not used in the eighteenth-century sense of ‘special operations’ in older sources. The supposed absence of any treatment of the subject is surprising considering the obsession with the ‘art of war’ in the Renaissance, but other authors attribute it to a supposed antinomy between chivalric ideals and irregular warfare. But the absence of explicit manuals on the subject is not evidence of absence of advanced reflection on this kind of operations in the Middle Ages and in Early Modern times. We should thus look elsewhere, in other genres, for writings that contain and pass on military knowledge. Epics, romances, educational and military treatises, and memoirs in fact contain elements of a theory of special operations, even though these genres differ from our conception of rationality inherited from the Enlightenment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The film Terramatta; Il Novecento italiano di Vincenzo Rabito analfabeta siciliano was inspired by my commitment to the practice of public history. I describe the ways in which the historical source represented by an ego-document, Vincenzo Rabito's autobiography, both encourages research into under-explored aspects of Italy's past and offers an opportunity to stimulate interest in the knowledge of that past among today's young generation. I identify the two main criteria that guided the selection of the film's narrative themes: first, relevance to the history of Italians between the First World War and the 1970s, not excluding its controversial moments; second, appropriate use of the documentary film materials stored mainly in the Archivio Luce. In signalling the development of a new project of digital history (http://www.archiviodegliiblei.it/) initiated alongside the film, I reflect on my own ambivalent sentiment of belonging rekindled by Rabito's autobiography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian readers consumed with great interest the fruits of the war books boom that began in Europe in the late 1920s. But it was not until the early 1930s that returned soldiers in Australia began to consider the war in memoir and fiction. This article examines the nature of Australian writing about the Great War during the 1930s and seeks to explain why the conflict produced little work of enduring interest or literary merit. It argues that literary representations of the war, which gave emphasis to its tragic and traumatic elements, were overwhelmed by those remembering a war that challenged but did not defeat its Australian participants. The article traces the reason for the triumph of what can be called ‘middlebrow’ representations of the Great War to the nationalist boon delivered by the experience of war to a colonial settler society of uncertain status. In prosecuting this argument, the article challenges the transnational emphasis of contemporary scholarship about literary modernism and seeks to reassert the significance of the nation-state as a category of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mass death in World War One had significant costs on the home front, including disruption of marriage and bereavement practices. Home front novels, women's fiction written with an aim of depicting this disruption as well as supporting the war effort, provide a lens through which to examine discursive attempts to reconcile personal love and loss with nationalist imperatives to suppress grief and make willing sacrifices for the good of the nation. Authors failed to achieve a consistent, clear prescription for their readers: their attention to personal pain and the war's effects on broad sections of society made adherence to collective ideologies, including nationalism and socialism, difficult to maintain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article traces the motif of the living-dead in Nathan Alterman's poetry, beginning withStars Outsideand throughTen Plagues of EgypttoThe City of the Dove, indicating the way in which Alterman's literary-symbolic structure was gradually replaced by a historical-literary one that reflects the influence of historical events – the two world wars, the Holocaust, and the War of Independence. With the wiping out of Jewish existence and literature, the Jewish hero became the Jewish victim and national symbol who in sacrificing himself ensured the life of the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the novelObsesivos días circulares(1969) by Gustavo Sainz from the point of view of the narrator's and characters' attempts to control the text. It analyses the distribution of influence on the text between the first-person narrator (Terencio) and one of the key characters (Leticia), and the changing locus of text control in the narrative line that includes Leticia. First, I examine Terencio's letters to Leticia and determine whether the text construct Leticia is created and manipulated through them. Secondly, I concentrate upon a section of Chapter 3 which appears to be a non-sequitur in the context of the narrative as a whole; it contains a vignette of a party where an apparently enigmatic exchange takes place between Terencio and Leticia. Finally, the article will address the changes in the narrator's character as a result of this encounter and the subsequent shift and split of the locus of text control between the narrator and one of the characters. Since the article explores various means of the distribution of text control, the theoretical foundation used here will include hegemonic masculinity and the relationship between hegemony and posthegemony in the context of text control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines children's literature that depicts people undergoing political conflict and war in a post-WWII era. These books portray political conflicts, refugees' relocation, and settlement in different countries. Using these books with drama inspired activities can help students gain awareness and empathetic attitudes toward those in a global community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The War on Terror has exposed deep problems within contemporary political practice. It has demonstrated the moral fragility of liberal democracy. Much critical literature on the topic is devoted to uncovering the sources of this fragility. In this paper, we accept the general thrust of much of this literature, but turn our attention to the practical upshot of the criticism. A common feature of the literature is that, when it comes to offering remedies of the problems it identifies, what is offered is ‘diagnosis without treatment’. The negation of a problem is regarded as a solution. For example, if the problem is that the USA is not acting as a good international citizen, the solution is that it begins to act as such. This is like a doctor diagnosing gout and recommending to the patient that they reduce the level of uric acid in their big toe. We argue that diagnosis without treatment is endemic in literature on the War on Terror and the ills of liberal democracy. We divide this literature into five categories and examine representative works in each. At the end of the paper, we describe what is required to avoid offering yet more diagnosis without treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research into Erasmus’s political ideas, notably his pacifism, should not be based on sources like Institutio Principis Christiani, Querela Pacis,or Dulce Bellum, which are rhetorical compositions and offer clichés rather than Erasmus’s personal opinions. At the very least, these sources should be checked against Erasmus’s theological writings, in which he presents specific and cogent arguments for his views and allows us to put them into their proper context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Wajdi Mouawad's playIncendies(2003), a photojournalist stands offstage, photographing a sniper who, it can later be deduced, is half-Lebanese and half-Palestinian by birth. The sniper sings along to Supertramp's ‘The logical song’, using his rifle as a guitar. But he refuses to allow the photojournalist to capture his silent image. The sniper shoots him, drags him onstage and verbally tortures him before he kills him. The sniper then uses the photojournalist's arm as a microphone and interviews himself in a rock star fantasy to reveal his biography. This scene is examined in detail to tease out the themes of listening and tracing origins and identities in war, exile and diaspora, and leads to questions about the role the media plays in the construction of Arab masculinity as both menacing and marginal. The article argues in conclusions that, as one of the leading voices in Francophone theatre today, Mouawad offers a new variation on engaged theatre, one that frames origins as a process rather than a matter of fact. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay looks at how Elizabeth Bowen's first postwar novel,A World of Love(1955), marks a turning point in her conceptualization of modern disconnection. The novel engages with contemporary postwar life through a broken linguistic texture that stylistically reflects technologies such as the telephone, radio, cinema, and airplane. Specifically, the airplane and concepts of an aerial database emerge in the novel as emblematic of modern communication. While Bowen's pre-1950s work portrays brokenness as hostile and inconclusive, her postwar stories turn to the progressive qualities of interruption. InA World of Love, interceptions act as points of mediation. In the aftermath of war, Bowen states that the writer's increased need to continue creating: ‘These years rebuff the imagination as much by being fragmentary as by being violent. […] we have to learn to survive while we learn to write’. After so much destruction, the impulse is towards coherence, rather than further breakage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]