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The essay offers criticism of Japanese author Yoshiya Nobuku's work "Onna no kyōshitsu" ("The Women's Classroom"), focusing on the story's portrayal of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the education of women. The author discusses female friendships in the story, and special attention is paid to the connection between the education of women in Japan and the development of an imperial mindset.

Literature on the participation of women in the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) during the Algerian War of 1954–62 has largely focused on one group of women FLN activists, the mujahidat. The mujahidat were women who left their homes and families to join the FLN armed guerrilla bands, the Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN). Within the historiography, two conflicting views on the mujahidat have emerged: that the FLN-ALN and male combatants by and large accepted their presence in the ALN, or alternatively that they were on the whole hostile to the presence of women. This essay examines these contrasting views on the history of the mujahidat and argues that, although divergent, studies on women in the ALN are not necessarily opposed, and may be largely complementary. Indeed, the debate over the mujahidat opens the way to new questions and reflections about the ways in which the history of the mujahidat has been written, and illustrates the diversity of women's experiences during the war, the contradictions found within the sources, and the contrast between different sources. More important, this debate also raises the question of the use of oral testimonies – the main source for the history of the mujahidat. A focus on silences – what is not said – in oral testimonies opens the way to reflections about the ways female participants have reflected on their own roles in the war in a postcolonial setting, as well as the ways historians have approached women's testimonies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1945-46 expulsion of Bohemian Germans and the subsequent colonization of the Czech borderlands both stemmed from the rationalist, utopian pursuit of purity and perfection that pervades twentieth-century history. Intrinsic to that pursuit is the attempt to eradicate guilt, which can be readily seen in Czech responses to the expulsions and the social and environmental devastation of the post-war borderlands. Beginning with the principle of 'collective guilt' used to justify the expulsions, Czech political, academic, and media rhetoric, schoolbooks, international collusion, and collective amnesia have perpetuated the dominant myth of the Czechs as victims, while seeking to discredit any suggestion of Czech guilt. Key novels from the first wave of Czech literature about the post-war borderlands - Sedlmayerová's The house on the green hill (1947) and R ˇezácˇ's Advance (1951) - explicitly show the suppression of guilt in action. This suppression is also evident in the imprisonment, soon after the 1948 Communist takeover, of the journalist Michal Maresˇ, who in 1946 and 1947 accused the state of both encouraging and covering up criminal conduct in the borderlands, thereby embedding criminality in the fabric of the emerging new society. Since the 1970s, a minority of Czech intellectuals have called on the Czech nation to confront this 'embedded' guilt as a step towards 'self-healing'. The origins of this perspective can be found in Jaroslav Durych's God's Rainbow (1969) and Josef Jedlicˇka's In the Midway of This Our Mortal Life (1966), both written in and about post-war North Bohemia in the 1950s. While Durych reasserts the place of guilt within the traditional Christian model of repentance, atonement, reconciliation and absolution, Jedlicˇka reflects the more fashionable Existentialist view of guilt as an inescapable part of the human condition. Their histories of publication and receptions show the extent to which their messages have been misunderstood and misrepresented. Their reincorporation into the mainstream, together with Maresˇ, as part of renewed reflection on the fragile concept of guilt, is vital to current efforts to complicate Czech understandings of their post-war history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1930s, a generation of British writers embraced the cinema at the same time as they committed themselves to left-wing politics. Stephen Spender later described radical German and Russian cinema as conveying ‘a message of hope like an answer to The Waste Land’. This article argues that cinema entered literature not just as a set of techniques, but as a mode of vision, and that this vision quickly became less hopeful. Having accepted the cinematic quality of their surroundings, several 1930s writers figured consciousness itself as a camera or projector. These narratives take the cinematic as read and investigate the experience of living in a world whose subjects are absent actors mediated by the cinema screen. In this context, the cinema becomes a vehicle not so much for a Benjaminian politicisation of aesthetics as for a more reactionary political disengagement. Here this is explored through a discussion of texts by Edward Upward and Christopher Isherwood and then through an analysis of the cinematic literature of the Spanish Civil War. The article ends with an analysis of Susan Sontag's critique of Baudrillard's ‘hyerperreal’, suggesting that this debate was prefigured in the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article sheds light on the origins of the military technical thinking in the military publishing of the Kingdom of Serbia with a view to marking a jubilee -- the sixtieth anniversary of the Military Technical Courier. „Vojin", the first military review, printed in the middle of 19th century as a private venture, covered a wide scope of military issues, among which a special place was given to „the science of weapons". No sooner had this review ceased to exist than The Headquarters of the Army of the Kingdom of Serbia started publishing a new military review, 'Ratnik", which, apart from the art of war and war literature, dealt with the science of weapons in order to inform officers about the latest achievements in military technology and to educate them as well. Serbian military thinking, including its technical aspect, did not fall behind modern trends in its European and world counterparts until 1914. The development of weaponry in Europe and the world was regularly covered on the pages of military reviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the writings of medical personnel from the First World War, and their participation as witnesses and healers of disease. It cites the nervous breakdowns prevalent in nurses on active service during the time. It analyzes the traumatic experiences of personnel through psychiatric and psychological approaches. It presents definitions for experiences presented in narratives of the personnel's emotional responses to war events.

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]

During the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, Abba Kovner Holocaust survivor, Jewish partisan and poet--served as an educational officer in the Givati Brigade, writing more than 30 battle missives between June 1948 and May 1949. These missives, which were distributed among the soldiers, were a novelty that Kovner introduced to the IDF, and their poetic register, expressionist style, high pathos, and blunt and extremely violent rhetoric put them in stark contrast to all other IDF propaganda of the time. The missives were immensely popular among Givati Brigade soldiers but were met with harsh criticism from other quarters in the IDF and from prominent political leaders. Kovner, I argue, persisted in writing his missives in the face of this opposition because in his eyes they served a necessary and important function. Through his gory battle missives, Kovner sought to cleanse the fighters of the guilt and shame of bloodshed and to give words to an unspoken trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Moenia: Revista Lucense de Lingüística & Literatura is the property of Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Servicio de Publicaciones and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article presents a critique of the play "Translations" by Brian Friel, with focus given to the story's similarity to that of the epic poem "Aeneid" by Latin poet Virgil. Friel's possible allusion to the Third Punic War is examined, with the English representing the invading Romans and the Irish the defeated Carthaginians. The main characters attempts to distance himself from Anglo-Irish conflict and anti-humanist viewpoints are detailed.

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]

Although in the first decades of the 20th century the Albanian literature for children did not recognize any distinguished literary work, a series of liberation insurrections in north and south as well as the Declaration of Independence in 1912 show the great efforts of our Renaissance figures who were teachers, ideologists and active participants in the armed movement. All this big issues in the life of Albanian people as well as their freedom-loving spirit become the inspiration of many themes, details and motives in the Albanian literature for children. Some of well-known representatives of our national Renaissance such as: Çajupi, Asdreni, Fishta, Mjeda, Gurakuqi, Xanoni, J.Bageri etc., continued writing even during the first decades of the 20th century. In their poetic and literary writings, one could distinguish the romantic spirit of the exuberance of the love for the country, for the nature, for the universe, and sometimes there could be distinguished even a realistic tone which described the Albanian life. Throughout all this literary work, the love for the country was connected with the love for the language and with the great efforts that were made for founding Albanian schools, with the reverberation of the wars for freedom, with the description of nature, birds and flowers as well as with the inspiration taken from the fantastical and fabulous world of the world literature. [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]

An essay is presented on the relationship between Cold War military strategy and metafiction. According to the author, both contain a discourse of simulation and display a need to create parallel worlds and institutions. Examples are drawn from several works of literature including the book "The Nuclear Age" by Tim O'Brien and the short story "Game" by Donald Barthelme. War-gaming and nuclear warfare are also discussed.

An essay is presented on the association between imperial war, literary practice, and soldierly identity in North Africa in the sixteenth century. It provides an overview of the history of war and culture, national crisis, and the Mediterranean life and explores the soldiering events through the writings of the protagonists and soldiers. It also looks into the siege, the conquest, the mutiny, and the disassembly of Africa based on the experience of harquebusier Baltasar del Hierro.

In his 1998 collection Hay, Paul Muldoon turns to Virgil for personal guidance through what he calls his 'crise/d'un certain age', but also for help in negotiating problems of national significance. For Muldoon, Virgil is the poet of aftermath, whose double perspectives allow him to examine the interaction of pastoral and epic, legacy and potential. In a number of eclogic and georgic pieces, as well as two small-scale epics, Hay foregrounds the relationship between pastoral (retreat, peace, domesticity) and epic (adventure, war, heroism) in order to consider three Virgilian kinds of aftermath. Following marriage and fatherhood, and the end of youth, Muldoon examines whether the settled life can retain its appeal against the force of the epic. After the death of his father, Muldoon imagines himself as Aeneas, exploring alternative lives, and the responsibilities and feelings that follow mourning, in terms of the legacy of the family and homeland. Thirdly, Hay takes up the persistence of grievances in the political realm, and scrutinises the responsibilities of pastoral poetry, in looking to the prospect of peace in Northern Ireland in the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colombia may be characterized as a society ruled over by "a routinization of war and oblivion". When memories about violent events succeed in articulate themselves and transcend the private space, they are not necessarily incorporated to national memory through "memory policies" in transitional processes. These memories are "deposited" rather than discussed. Testimonial literature is one of those "deposits". There are times when certain topics, witnesses, authors and narrative treatments attain an unexpected relevance. Such a relevance follows national factors, like the dynamics of conflict and society in Colombia and abroad, such as a "turn to past". When making a survey across the development of the testimonial genre from mid-20th century Violence up to our times, the gravitation of several cultures of memory is made evident in a society where oblivion appears to prevail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on presenting a more accurate portrait of Arkadii Gaidar (Arkady Petrovich Golikov), a Soviet writer of children's literature and promoter of the pro-Soviet "Timur movement." Gaidar's works focused upon the heroes of the Soviet Union and war (the Russian Civil War and the Great Patriotic War), romanticizing the revolutionary struggle and promoting support for the Red Army and of soldiers' families. The story "Timur and his squad" (1940), propelled Gaidar to fame and sparked an altruistic mass movement among Young Pioneers and other children's organizations all over the Soviet Union. However, recent research reveals Gaidar was a murderer in the Russian Civil War, an alcoholic with mental issues, and that his movement was anything but voluntary and satisfying to members.

The article offers the author's insights regarding his interview with writer Maurice Bardèche. He notes that Bardèche has discussed the War years and was obsessed by the Vichy period which he represents as a morality of play. He cites that Bardèche has displaced, projected and fetishized Robert Brasillach through the founding of Les Sept Couleurs, a publishing venture to reprint Brasillach's books such as "Oeuvres complètes."

Copyright of Analisis Politico is the property of Universidad Nacional de Colombia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Christopher Isherwood focuses on the self within his writing. The importance of identity is closely associated with what he calls his 'complex of terrors' connected to war. Isherwood presents a mythologized self-analysis that engages with images of the First World War, especially the heroics of war. Thinking in paradoxical terms of the Truly Strong Man and the Truly Weak Man, Isherwood felt inferior because he had not faced the 'test' of war. This paper engages with Isherwood's early novel The Memorial and his 'autobiography' Lions and Shadows. It looks at questions of identity, weakness and strength, as well as Isherwood's rebellion against a generation whom he not only blames for the war that took his father from him, but also for his feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the song cycle Ludlow and Teme, written by Ivor Gurney in 1919. Gurney set poems from A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad (1896), which were popular with many composers in the early twentieth century. However, Gurney's recent war experience and his own war poetry tell a very different story from Housman's pre-war poetic versions of the military. The article examines the complex relationship between the songs and their texts. It looks at how Gurney, a poet and composer, uses Housman's words to write songs that both embrace and attack the military, exploring in music the same themes with which his own war poems are concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poets of the Great War drew constantly on the poetry of earlier centuries. Very little of it was written by soldier poets - Homer may have been a warrior but Shakespeare, for example, or Wordsworth, Keats, and Whitman certainly were not. When Arthur Bliss, himself a serving officer in the Great War, came to commemorate his brother and friends who had been killed, he did so in Morning Heroes (1930), a 'symphony for chorus, orator and orchestra'. Although he included one poem by Owen and another by Robert Nichols, pride of place went to the Iliad and to Whitman. For the next generation, however, the Great War had become the definition of war itself, just as the work of its soldier poets had become the definition of war poetry. When, after the Second World War, Britten, himself a non-combatant, came to write his War Requiem, it was almost inevitably to the words of Wilfred Owen that he turned. This piece will explore some of the meanings and consequences of that shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented that considers the male body in literature from a historical perspective that begins in the 1640s and how domestic wars in England at that time impacted the national literature and created a number of instances where male characters are dismembered in some way. The ideas of literary critic Peter Brooks on how the bodies of men and women are represented in literature are considered. Other topics include the 1639-1659 Civil War in England, soldiers' manuals, and technological innovations in modern warfare, such as gunpowder.

This paper examines the role that veterans played in the construction of historical memory narratives in mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan. I argue that veterans, who had long established a ‘language community’ with a particular way to speak about the war, found it difficult to communicate with post-war audiences that did not share that experience. The paper analyses six categories of ‘memory writing’ that veterans used to engage with memory debates: post-war diaries, ‘testimonial literature’, articles and literary works, surveys and oral histories, memoirs, and paratext. This study thus proposes that veterans do not avoid discussion of war, but can only be ‘heard’ by members of their language community, or by a post-war society that is prepared to ‘listen’ to their message with little mediation. This is a direct consequence of their experience of the war, and how they crafted their language community at that time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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.

Are the texts written by Josef Mühlberger dealing with war experience really texts about war? And if they are, to what extent are they a relevant testimony about war events? Scholars have rarely focused on these questions. Based on the analysis of the story The Partisan this paper shows that political content in Mühlberger's work is used to present problems and the camouflaged discussion of homosexual intimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses several subjects and approaches that are important in studying English language arts at the secondary level. It says that ecological literacy needs comprehension and understanding of human interactions with the environment. It states that reading green can help explore the role of literature in cultural responses through nature writing or environmental literature. Moreover, it suggests that teachers can teach the literature of war to students during English teaching.

Copyright of OHM: Obradoiro de Historia Moderna is the property of Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Servicio de Publicaciones and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses themes of sexuality and gender identity in the novels of U.S. author Helen Wells, focusing on her fictional depictions of the nurse Cherry Ames. In many novels Ames worked as a nurse during World War II. Social anxiety over women's bodies in the U.S. prior to the war is described. Depictions of war, often made less violent than in reality, in these novels are discussed. The author emphasizes Cherry's femininity, her relationships with men, and her chastity. The political consequences of female identity as portrayed in the novels are discussed.

The article presents the author's insights on Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz, who authored treatises about war. The author says that Clausewitz, who defined war as combat, fighting, and bloodshed, believes that the nature of war is timeless and immutable. He discusses how the Clausewitzian view of war have influenced military historians, theorists, soldiers, and marines including John A. Lynn, Victor Davis Hanson, and Martin van Creveld. He also argues that the nature of war is mutable.

Two South African novels, Congo Song (Cloete [1943]1973) and Moxyland (Beukes 2008) comment on the central part played by artists and their work in the midst of a society on the brink of war. Both narratives are set in Africa; one portrays a close-knit white community in the Congo in 1939, facing the collapse of their colonial way of life, the other depicts the apocalyptic nature of a dystopian Cape Town around 2018, reflecting the global reality of environmental catastrophe, deadly epidemics and state and corporate tyranny. In both texts art and artists play pivotal roles within a group of characters, and their views of their work, the multiple manifestations of creative art and the relationship between their specific communities and what is regarded there as art, form an integral part of the narrative whole. This article focuses on how various textual strategies are exploited to reveal how the creative urge is linked with resistance against as well as support for destructive violence. It also discusses aspects of the novels that are structured to, on the one hand, endorse the quest for romantic aestheticism and, on the other hand, forecast the reign of cyberspace and genetically modified art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the life, career, and legacy of the Jewish East German writer Berta Lask, who is particularly remembered for her anti-war poetry, Communist writings on the labor movement, and proletarian children's literature. Lask's persecution under National Socialism, emigration and long exile in the Soviet Union, and writings after her return to (East) Berlin (East Germany) are examined. Her politically controversial story "Flüchtlinge" ("Refugee") is also discussed and presented.

The article discusses the association and influence of the economic and social situations in la banlieue, refers to the residential district outside a city in France with the country's literary field. It states that the concept of la banlieue originates in 1920s wherein social and political problems arise due to war. It also features the literary idea between colony and banlieue concerning the origin of immigrants and the distinction of Jacques Rancière.

There has been a steady growth of western interest in the writings and wartime accounts of Iraqi women, representing a burgeoning literature, of interest to scholars of Middle East politics and history, as well as gender studies. This article considers the diaries of Nuha al-Radi (NR) and their reception and representation by American readers, both within specialized fields of Middle East studies as well as across the broader American audience. NR, a western-educated Iraqi woman, established herself as a ceramic artist of international acclaim. In 1991, NR began her Baghdad Diaries, originally publishing her wartime account in the British literary journal Granta in 1992, which was subsequently expanded and published in book forms in 1998 and 2003. NR's piercing account of Iraq under war, both physical and economic, highlights the details of everyday survival. Her focus examines the often ignored aspects of war survival, the ‘disorientation, uncomprehending sadness, and denial of the victims' suffering’. With the 2003 publication of NR's Baghdad Diaries by Vintage Press, NR's work reached a wider audience in the United States. The discovery of NR's work by American readers is examined here critically, with an examination of the various uses and interpretations of NR's text by academic readers. American interpretations of the Baghdad Diaries are examined in terms of how American readers have used NR's narrative for scholarly inquiries in varied academic questions concerning Iraq: notions of just war and the practice of American warfare in Iraq; oncology and the use of depleted uranium in Iraq, as well as environmental concerns; the role of women in conditions of war; and other inquiries. Finally, this article examines the reception of NR's diaries in the popular press, where treatments of her diaries have been met with reactions ranging from condescending and chauvinism to empathy and intrigue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 discusses the impact of World War I on the publication of the German travel guides generally known as Baedekers, focusing particularly on the popularity of Baedekers' outside of Germany. Scottish brothers James and Findlay Muirhead published the English-language Baedekers prior to the war, but created their own guidebooks after the war to sell to customers living in Allied countries. The author also considers the physical effect of the war on Europe's landscapes and how changes to landmarks and destruction of property had an impact on the accuracy of guidebooks.

The article considers the history and poetry of American woman poet Ruth Bryant, written during the American Revolution. At the start of the Revolution in 1775, Bryant was fifteen years old and living in North Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Some of her poems written between 1775 and 1783 considered include "An Address to the Sons of Liberty Written in the Year 1775" and "Heedless Youth," which the author compares to the writings of African American poet Phyllis Wheatley and American author Mercy Otis Warren. Other subjects are American women authors at the end of the eighteenth century, an overview of Bryant's life during the Revolution, and the experiences of children during the Revolution.

In recent years there has been compelling debate about the “aesthetic turn” and, more generally, the impact of art in international relations (IR). And yet few, if any, of the discussions and debates related to aesthetics have addressed the issue of cruelty or fully explored the role that literature could play in global politics. The article starts with a preliminary discussion about IR, as part of a broader conversation about inter-disciplinary studies of global politics, alternative knowledge claims, aesthetics and literature. The second part of the article advances a particular set of ideas about imagination, interpretation and intuitive knowledge claims which are presented as methodological and conceptual tools associated with literature, and are thus embedded in the “aesthetic turn”. The third section of the article explicates the three methodological tools through an examination of the politics of cruelty. The final sections of the article turn to work by the Czech-born Paris-based writer Pavel Hak so as to push forward debates about radical creativity in literature, enriching discussions about cruelty and war, and IR and global politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores contemporary war novels for evidence of a late twentieth-century code of heroic action in the U.S. It cites that award-winning Civil War and World War II literature for children extends a code of shared humanity implied in adult war novels by Pat Barker and others to younger protagonists. It notes that the said heroic code opposes traditional codes of conduct construed as confining in their conventional or stereotypical presentation of the hero. It states that writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald have rejected any romantic notion of courage as they understood that young men of his generation would not soon want to wage such a horrible war.

This article investigates the relationship between civil war onset and state capacity through a focus on the role of primary commodities. This is accomplished by moving the focus of the civil war literature away from an almost exclusive concern with the incentives of rebels to a consideration of both rebels and rulers as revenue seeking predators. This predatory theory approach expects that higher levels of state capacity should deter civil war onset, while civil war onset should reduce state capacity. Further, natural resource rents are expected to enhance state capacity, rather than increase the likelihood of civil war onset. In order to deal with the endogeneity posed by including fiscal measures of state capacity in single equation models of civil war onset, this study employs a simultaneous equations framework. This framework allows us to capture the effects of civil war onset on state capacity and vice versa, as well as the effects of primary commodities on both endogenous covariates. The main findings from the statistical analyses include: state capacity does not affect civil war onset, but civil war onset reduces state capacity; and primary products directly affect only state capacity - they do not directly affect civil war onset, as found in previous contributions to the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the role of literature in curing neurasthenia, shell-shock, or posttraumatic stress disorder brought by wars to writers Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and Andy Collins. It says that their psychological knowledge towards literary works somehow resolve the writer's mental and even emotional conflicts. It adds that writing war memoirs through their characters in fiction and poetry symbolize recovery.

The article discusses late 20th and early 21st century Arabic literature, whose texts are said to employ extreme imagery in descriptions of war, death, and violence. The author probes such questions as the function of such topics in Arab society and literature and whether such imagery selection represents a form of auctorial self-stylization and narcissism or a distressed literary response to a cruel, barely endurable Middle Eastern reality. Literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt's New Historicism is exploited as a framework for investigating these questions.

This article attempts to circumscribe a field of enquiry around what Wu Ming 1 defined as 'unidentified narrative objects'. It demonstrates how, within narratives such as Asce di Guerra (2000) [Axes of War] by Wu Ming and Vitaliano Ravagli, Gomorra (2006) [Gomorrah] by Roberto Saviano, Dies irae (2006) [Day of Wrath] by Giuseppe Genna and Sappiano le mie parole di sangue (2007) [My Words be Bloody] by Babsi Jones, a recurrent series of modal figures defines the relationship between literature and the real. Starting from Gomorra, the article attempts to delineate a taxonomy, to make sense of the continuous overlapping and re-bidding between the textual and the extra-textual fields at stake in the novels. The aim is both to clarify how these novels take up a liminal literary position and to deepen our understanding of their own peculiar form of realism. The notion of realism in this context refers less to a stylistic construct according to specific compositional codes than to a 'textualization of the real', wherein reality presents itself within the texts through a system of references external to the text itself. [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.

Norbert Gstrein's novel The Craft of Killing (Das Handwerk des Tötens, 2003) weaves historical references to the war in Yugoslavia and the murder of journalist Gabriel Gruener (1963-1999) into a narrative construction that creates a sense of distance from that same historical reality. The narrative accomplishes this through multilayered character perspectives as well as intertextual and meta-fictional references. This kind of reality-based narration has long been free of the stigma of the roman à clef and aims instead at producing literature that reflects existential themes as well as their appropriate aesthetic and ethical representation(s). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the perspective of the actors of the classical literature "The Iliad" by Homer as part of the "Page and Stage" program held at the Los Angeles Central Public Library in California. It examines how the play affects the psychological aspects of the actors in understanding their own humanity. It highlights that the play gave actors as well the audiences the opportunity to reflect on the outcomes of war. Furthermore, the play made the audiences to mirror the corrupt practices of politicians and the international conflict of some countries particularly the war in Iraq.

A literary criticism is presented of the book "Flags in the Dust," by William Faulkner. It explores the action of lying down for sleep or sexual activity in the narrative and the themes of stasis and death. Emphasis is also given to topics such as descriptions of twilight and dusk and the psychological impact of war.