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This essay provides a critical review of the field of postcolonial African genocide writing. The review makes a case for scholarly recognition of the discourse of African genocide literature. The essay advances some broad claims, among which include the following: that genocidal atrocities in Africa have provoked a body of imaginative literature, which, among other things, has attempted to imagine the conditions giving rise to African genocides, and that this body of literature underlines a confluence of sensibilities shaping atrocity writings and their critical receptions in Africa since the mid-twentieth century. The review provides a critical overview of fictional narratives as well as their scholarly receptions bordering on genocidal atrocities in the Nigerian and Rwandan contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay puts forward Muriel Rukeyser’s Life of Poetry as the site of articulation of a radical and still urgently relevant experimental feminine poetics of war. The power of this poetics is rooted not in proximity to combat experience, but in the interweaving of public and political fact, personal exploration, and imaginative experiment in an era of constant and pervasive conflict. In her contribution to the 1945 anthology The War Poets, Rukeyser admits, ‘For myself, war has been in my writing since I began.’ If poetry, as she describes it, allows people to feel ‘the meeting of their consciousness and the world,’ then twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry must be war poetry; not so much a ‘genre’ as a mode of encounter. Rukeyser’s experimental feminine poetics of war provides a way to counter dichotomies between the poetry of inner selves and outer experience, between personal and political writing, and between all of the previous and formally innovative writing, indeed, between war and peace. In addition to engaging Walter Benjamin’s concept of history and Susan Schweik and Elaine Scarry’s writings on war and the imagination, this essay draws upon conceptions of the feminine in work by Alice Notley, Audre Lorde, and Joan Retallack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay puts forward Muriel Rukeyser’s Life of Poetry as the site of articulation of a radical and still urgently relevant experimental feminine poetics of war. The power of this poetics is rooted not in proximity to combat experience, but in the interweaving of public and political fact, personal exploration, and imaginative experiment in an era of constant and pervasive conflict. In her contribution to the 1945 anthology The War Poets, Rukeyser admits, ‘For myself, war has been in my writing since I began.’ If poetry, as she describes it, allows people to feel ‘the meeting of their consciousness and the world,’ then twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry must be war poetry; not so much a ‘genre’ as a mode of encounter. Rukeyser’s experimental feminine poetics of war provides a way to counter dichotomies between the poetry of inner selves and outer experience, between personal and political writing, and between all of the previous and formally innovative writing, indeed, between war and peace. In addition to engaging Walter Benjamin’s concept of history and Susan Schweik and Elaine Scarry’s writings on war and the imagination, this essay draws upon conceptions of the feminine in work by Alice Notley, Audre Lorde, and Joan Retallack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hino Ashihei served the longest time for Japan, in the Pacific War, and was widely known as a war writer. Also, he greatly loved one kind of Japanese goblin (yōkai) called kappa1, and wrote many novels, children’s stories, and essays about them. He published a collection of forty-three kappa stories called “Kappa Mandala”2, and other collections like “Kappa Ascension3, “Kappa Conference” 4, and “Twelve Kappa Stories”5. However, this group of works by Hino about kappa has not been studied yet. In this paper, from the many works about kappa which Hino wrote, I will discuss “Stone and Nail” 「石と釘」, a story based on a folktale from the author’s birthplace. Although an absurd children’s story, “Stone and Nail” carries within it Hino’s longing for peace. Here, I will also discuss the comic titled “Urine” 「小便」, based on two of Hino’s stories, “Stone and Nail” and “Ghost” 「亡霊」, and drawn by Mizuki Shigeru, a Japanese cartoonist who loved yōkai. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the depiction of the German civil war in Theodor Fontane's 1870 book "Der deutsche Krieg von 1866" with the goal of increasing awareness of the book as a work of war literature. The mythologization of war heroism and heroic death is examined, the influence of war modernization on war literature is described, and information is offered on the depiction of Jews and antisemitism in Fontane's book.

Responding to long-term debate over the position and outlook of the love story in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929), this essay argues that love is the centering principle of the novel. Indeed, the narrative posits a world in which love magnetically attracts the characters with its power to illuminate lived experience with a tangible sense of meaning. Deploying actor-network theory and recognizing the retrospective, mediated nature of Frederic Henry's narrative, this essay analyzes the novel for what it tells today's readers about one man's attempt to find meaning after the horrors of the Great War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay uses Samuel Hynes and Eric Leed to argue that Jake Barnes's journey in The Sun Also Rises, culminating in the violent act of the bullfight, manifests a structural replication of his war experience and, additionally, of what Barbara Ehrenreich theorizes as the origins and passions of war. This replication ultimately proves salubrious. Moreover, Jake's ringside position as spectator and mediator literally re-enacts the role of aerial observer, while also speaking to the transitional nature of modern total warfare toward a paradigm that Jan Mieszkowski has described as placing center stage social mobilization, spectatorship, and narration rather than combat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the ways in which a selection of influential, middle-class women mourned their brothers' deaths through their writing. Some, inspired by the ghost of their lost brother, self-consciously set out to create and mould the written account of women's suffering in war; others were solely interested in the creative and regenerative effect of the dead brother's presence in their own work, sublimating their own guilt at survival into an impulse to write. Vera Brittain, Katherine Mansfield, Rose Macaulay, and Cicely Hamilton contributed in fiction and autobiography to what we might describe as a specifically female memory of the war, focussed through their depictions of their brothers' deaths. Their writing, particularly in Brittain's case, has played a considerable part in the formation of the sense of the 'lost generation' of the 1920s, which in turn has shaped later perceptions of the war. However, a detailed examination reveals that when these women's writings are read alongside each other, a more troubling and complex picture emerges-we find bizarre manifestations of guilt and grief, and a sense of a mourning that is forbidden and incomplete, revealing itself through hallucination, haunting, and possession. Their narratives speak of the very particular complexity of survival for women, who, in the post-war years, must somehow reconcile their mourning with their own continuing creativity and achievements in the space left by their lost brothers and lovers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After providing a theoretical framework pertaining to the field of Reception of Classic in the first part of this essay (LAURIOLA, 2014) and after discussing some related issues from a pedagogical viewpoint, I introduced, as case study, works and initiatives by a psychiatrist (SHAY, 1991, 1994, 2002), an American director (DOERRIES, 2008), and two scholars (MEINECK, 2010a, b, 2012; TRITLE, 1998, 2000, 2010) who have been proposing a use of Classical Literature as a therapeutic and awareness-raising tool in response to the problems that modern wars have been causing. Veterans and their family, as well as the whole civic community, are the addressees of their work. What follows is a detailed analysis of those works with the intention both to determine whether they can be classified as work of reception - which, so far, has never been proposed - and to discuss the plausibility of this kind of reception, which also turns into social outreach, and how it can be proposed without risking to completely dismiss changes that have occurred in the vision of war, although we may agree that the sufferings of war did not change too much1. Like in the first part, the discussion will be also carried on within a pedagogical discourse. A personal note based on a personal experience will conclude the analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a literary investigation of the 1948 war and the cultures of Zionist military formation. In this study, literature is understood as the record of war from the human perspective. Employing a conceptual distinction between the militia and the regular army, I trace the tension between the concurring cultures of war, allowing a conceptualization of the war of 1948 as three separate wars. The war begins with the cultural domination of the militia in 1947, which defines the culture and literature of 1948. As military power becomes more organized, the militias become a regular army, executing territorial expansion and the dispossession of the Palestinians. The figural character of revenge dominates the literature and is examined as underlying the dynamic of violence between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foundational to the English novel in the eighteenth century was a narrative grammar of the human structured around two ideas: sympathy and sovereignty. Linking these two were deliberations on the role of technology in determining the reach and extent of the sympathetic imagination. This essay reprises the novel's historical links with distant suffering and technologies of mediation – the staple of debates on the sentimental novel and the rise of Abolitionism in the late eighteenth century – in the context of the emergence of a critical mass of world novels written against the backdrop of post-1989 sites of geopolitical carnage. New media technologies and multiple visual regimes have been critical in mediating these deathworlds for diverse publics around the world. What changes, I ask, are being wrought on the narrative grammar of the human in the novel form in this era of spectatorial capitalism where the capacity to respond to distant suffering has increased manifold with advances in information technology? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article begins with a rereading of the wartime essays of Virginia Woolf and George Orwell on the nature and affects of aerial bombing. In each case it is argued that the experience of being bombed reveals something about the nature of nationalism and the education of the senses. It is suggested that Britain can be conceived as both a bombed and a bombing culture. An account of the relationship between colonial power and bombing is presented through a review of the work of critical war historians. In addition, a brief discussion is included of the historical amnesia regarding the role of colonial soldiers in the Second World War. It is suggested that contemporary debates about nationalism and racism would benefit from being informed by analytical conversations between militarism, formations of nationalism, and the issue of contemporary multiculturalism. The article develops the notion of the racist nervous systems as an analytical metaphor which foregrounds the affective qualities of racism. The article ends with a discussion of the relationship between these processes and multiculturalism, the "war on terror" and the role of the British army - many of whose recruits continue to come from Commonwealth countries - in global counterinsurgency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an analysis of the psychological and spiritual aspects of war, its impact on civilization, and the implications of such forces for human culture and rationality. Examples from the World Wars of the 20th century are discussed, and comparisons are drawn to the Roman era and the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century. Authors such as Leo Tolstoy, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Robert Musil are cited discussing the overwhelming nature of mass warfare, and its effects on humanity as a whole.

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Dunya Mikhail's collection of war poetry ‘The War Works Hard’ reveals the double eclipsing suffered by women, first as Iraqis, and then as Iraqi women, during the current crisis in Iraq. This marginalization constitutes another war crime in the form of a tacit yet complicit agreement between colonizers and resistors to achieve their self-defined goals of liberation at the expense of women. Using Nawal El Saadawi's concept of ‘dissidence and creativity’, I demonstrate how Mikhail's poetic testimony of the war unsettles the reader with its probing existential meditations on the human cost of war and sanctions. The collection represents a crucial feminized intervention in war poetry to relate the anguish of mothers, wives and daughters, the search for place and identity and the sense of displacement occasioned by exile and occupation. While all forms of creative resistance such as literature, cinema, dance, art and music represent valuable acts of resistance, this essay makes the case that poetry goes beyond the limits of the possible (and acceptable) by its ability to resonate with a certain ‘vibration’ of thought and feeling. As an oral narrative, poetry eludes borders and boundaries to imagine its own sensorial landscapes. Poetry penetrates the very depths of the unconscious to revive repressed memories, expose gaping wounds, provide healing in moments of despair, connect with the wonders of nature in an ‘unnatural’ environment of fear and violence, and to celebrate the spirit of survival in commemorative verse. In other words, poetry, as a form of creative resistance, becomes an urgent call to action in situations of domination and anarchy, through its articulation of a sense of ethical consciousness. In so doing, poetry gives voice to traumatic experience and the un-nameable, this precarious non-dit, resisting transliteration in conventional language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article critiques the essay "Conquering Cities and 'Conquering' Women" by Otto Rank. It grants that Rank gathers evidence in poetry of a link between sexual violence and state violence, but questions his leaps from the texts to the motives. It cites the essay's translator, David Winter, who notes that the metaphor of killing being like sex is different from saying that killing is sexual. It notes that the texts Rank assembles leave out the horrors of warfare and present only the pleasures. It notes modern war phrases such as hearts and minds and shock and awe, after which comes liberation with flowers being thrown at soldiers. The disastrous nature of such fantasies is noted.

The article focuses on the varied aspects of war and military violence in Europe. Accordingly, violence is also a critique of war, military violence which is primordial and paradigmatic of all violence used for natural ends. It notes that expounding the relations of blood to war and justice hardly seems compelling as a pressing epistemo-critical task of political import.

The article focuses on the psychological aspects of war in relation to literature in Europe. It says that the truth that psychoanalysis bring to war from afar is that the unavoidable disillusionment of the non-combatant in the face of the cruelty and barbarity of civilised European men in civilised European countries. It notes that the other side of war leaves people deceived in a world that has grown strange.

This article looks at British short stories of and about the First World War, written and published between 1914 and 1939. Drawing on a corpus of over 400 stories, the authors discuss the short story's merit as a contribution to the cultural history of the Great War. Short stories document the war and its perception in small fragments, addressing everyday concerns, interests and anxieties of those who experienced the conflict at first hand, whether as civilians on the home front or combatants in one of the many theatres of war: land, air and sea, France, Belgium or the Middle East. While memoirs and novels established themselves as the main genres for the depiction of the war's long-term effects, and poetry as the major medium of its commemoration, the short story offers a glimpse into the immediate experience of the war, a snapshot of the moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A consideration of ancient and recent war literature can be useful in discussion of military ethics. Twentieth-century war literature reveals its origins in ancient literature by creating modern versions of the Homeric male. The writings of James Jones, Evelyn Waugh, and Kurt Vonnegut about the soldier's experience in World War II depict efforts to find ethical fulfillment in soldiering that are respectively reminiscent of Achilles, Agamemnon, and Ulysses: the warrior, the gentleman, and the storyteller. These figures illustrate the dependency of ethics and virtue on social context and on creative, self-narrative, and discursive language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Russo-Japanese war in the context of the emergence of Japonisme. The author provides an in depth analysis of the impact of the war on Russian art and literature. He examines how the war manifested itself in Russian cultural consciousness on the domestic front. The nationalist response to the belligerent colonialist expansion of Russia in the Far East is discussed. Studies that investigate the causes and military operations of the war are highlighted. These include papers by writers Petr Vykhodtsev, Paul Bushkovitch, and Barbara Heldt.

The article presents the authors' views on Russia's socioeconomic development, in reference to the impact of several wars in its history and the role of the country's development in the world. They state that all wars, whether large or small, have affected Russia's internal and external development. They remark that several past military actions have put an extremely strenuous effort on the economy of the country, putting its demand on sciences, culture, arts, literature and people's intellect.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate governmental repression combined with the type of regime that might determine a civil war. As a rule, scholars have not considered both variables in one quantitative model, in a systematic fashion. No empirical work employing political philosophy approaches can be found among the current quantitative literature on civil war. Therefore, this paper fills the gap, by grounding our work on a more robust theory, complementing the originally data-driven pieces. Three different hypotheses are tested and the findings indicate that poor countries with hybrid regimes and a high level of governmental repression are more likely to become involved in civil wars than countries with democratic or autocratic regimes. This paper can work as a contribution to the failed states discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the war between the U.S. and Mexico from 1846 to 1848 and James Russell's "The Biglow Papers." It mentions that literature on the war ignore the contradictions in its purpose and instead discusses American exceptionalism and patriotism. The article describes the debates on the war's morality and the mythology which writers created in support of the war. It discusses "The Biglow Papers," a satire against the war by James Russell. The article examines "The Biglow Papers" and its discussion on the war.

The article discusses the theme of the January 2007 issue of the journal "Inchiesta." This issue has brought together authors from very divergent fields and disciplines and who, in consequence use very different theories and presentations from each other. However, all of them share one precise objective, which is that of the reconstruction of the nexus between war and communication from different angles.

Sheds light on some of the hidden histories of how the British government, through the Ministry of Information (MOI), managed to carry out its book-buying and publishing program during World War II. Nature of the relationship of the MOI with professional publishers; Functions of the MOI; Introduction of paper rationing and its impact on publishers.

Purpose - Aims to look at the post-war problems of continental libraries. Design/methodology/approach - Presents the author's own experiences and memories of lost literature in the war years. Findings - In many countries the whole network of libraries was built up afresh - almost from nothing - with shortage of paper, of books, of library equipment, of building accommodation and library staff. Originality/value - The author stresses the importance of the resumption of the activities of international librarian organizations to facilitate the exchange of ideas, the discussion of various questions, and the re-establishment of pre-war services such as interlibrary loans, photographic services, exchange of publications, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the Canudos war in Brazil during 1896-97. Dominant representation of the war; Writings about the Conselheiro; Comments on the book "Rebellion in the Backlands"; Impact on Brazilian literature.

Discusses the effect of war on bodies of writing and literature. Literary pieces that challenge the canonical narratives of war; Comparison of the processes of censorship and canonization during and after the Second World War in both Japan and the United States; Assessment of the literary casualties of the World War II period; Critical gap between discussions of wartime and postwar Japanese literature; Factors that create the analogous divide between approaches that focus either solely on the canon or on the margin in the wider field of cultural studies.

This essay comments on the effects of zeppelins over literature. The dominant effect that the war produced on writers was a mood of irony and disillusionment. The impact of the zeppelin on the imagination of home-front writers belies the general mood of dread. Artists and intellectuals were particularly taken with the contradictory mix of fascination and repulsion that the airship evoked. The effect of the zeppelin was not simply traumatic; it inspired awe as well as fear, excitement as well as dread. The zeppelin simultaneously displaced attention from soldiers at the front and allowed civilians to identify with soldiers, to feel their own roles in the war as central, and their own lives at risk.

The article focuses on the relationship between poetry and soldiers. The contemporary poetry in the United States continues to draw on war for its themes, figures, and forms, poets and soldiers tend to perceive themselves at a pronounced remove. The relationship of poetry with wars is still very much alive at the beginning of the twenty-first century, because there was no shortage of wars about which to write, yet the once intertwined existence of soldier and poet, which perhaps reached its apex in the composite soldier-poet of World War I has been replaced by diffidence, curiosity, and even distrust.

The First and Second World Wars, as well as other global conflicts, have merited reflection on the literature they occasioned. Yet the Cold War seems to have avoided such a literary retrospective. Starting with films in 2001 which evoked Cold War controversies, a first attempt is made here to sketch an anthology of Cold War literature, including novels, poetry, cinema, and other forms of popular culture. A thematic outline of the Book of the Cold War, which covers five distinct topics, is proposed: nuclear war; wars of the third world; belief and betrayal; the spy novel; and the end of cold war. This literary overview is suggestive of how substantial and varied the literary reflection on the Cold War has been, how this diversity says something about the complex levels of the Cold War itself, and finally, how culture not only reflected but was a factor in the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the significance of literature on the Vietnam War as reflections of or celebrations of history. Social impact of the war; Debate over the military strategy employed in the war; Effects of political constraints on military decision making.

The manner in which states behave within interstate disputes is of particular theoretical interest to those concerned with the question of why some disputes between states escalate to war while others do not. Much of the literature on interstate crises suggests that the way in which a state responds to a challenge from another state is a useful predictor of the way that crisis will end, i.e., whether the crisis will escalate to war. This analysis uses data on militarized disputes and finds this to be the case. The analysis goes further, however, in that it isolates some of the important factors influencing how targets of militarized challenges respond to those challenges. The results suggest that moving from interstate war to a finer level of analysis, such as the intra-dispute behavior of states, can provide a more complete picture of how commonly held theoretical notions are related to the presence or absence of interstate war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a burgeoning literature on the relationship between democracy and war. Building on the knowledge already gained on this topic; this paper suggests several areas for further verification, clarification, and extension. It addresses especially the need to attend to data coding conventions, opportunity asymmetries, context-specific explanations, reciprocal causality, historical contingency, and rules of translation between different levels of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the research addressing the question of whether democracies are less war-prone than are other types of nation-states. I argue that we have witnessed a great deal of cumulation in this body of literature and that our understanding has grown substantially over the past decades. Furthermore, I suggest that this literature has advanced through the interplay of theoretical and empirical work in which empirical analyses have posed questions requiring the development of new theories, which in turn have produced new hypotheses requiring additional empirical work. I note that recent work provides two competing theoretical arguments accounting for the empirical evidence and suggest research strategies that may produce a reconciliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque in an effort to elucidate the humorous vitality of Jonathan Swift's treatment of the subject of war in "Gulliver's Travels". Views on the dimensions of war; Ways in which Swift's language enacts carnivalesque or saturnalian features.

Examines author Hugh MacDiarmid's writings on his war experiences. Description of the French landscape in the aftermath of battle in the prose sketch "Casualties"; MacDiarmid's attitude to the war; MacDiarmid's immersion into the fact and fiction of war.

This article examines the importance of literature in school instruction in the U.S. With the imminence of war as an added force in 1940, the Committee on International Relations of the National Council of Teachers and English explored the possibilities of literature as a means of sustaining peace, brotherhood, and democracy. Faced with the reality of war two years later, the Basic Aims Committee of the National Council of Teachers of English defined the purposes that literature should serve in time of conflict by way of enriching personal living, deepening understanding of social relationships, illuminating the contemporary scene, developing insight into the American attitude of minds and conditions of life, and promoting national unity.

Discusses English literature before the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Consciousness of the imaginative writers regarding social condition in England; Works of purely literary violence; Fear of a future war and possible invasion of England by many writers.

Focuses on novel about war. Literary form and pattern; Presentation of the story; Intention of the author.