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The article reflects on the evolution of the periodical from its inception in 1989 to its 2023 status as a leading journal, highlighting its growth from a modest publication to a prominent international platform for exploring the intersections of war, literature, and the arts. Topics include the journal's early expansion, its pivotal role in hosting conferences and lectures, and its impact on the literary and artistic community.

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses various articles published in this issue of the periodical including one on strategies for teaching war literature, another on the creation of a historical memory of war and one on Levinas' philosophy of otherness.

This article focuses on one of the most pressing issues in Ukraine today, the ongoing war in the Donbass. Using selected examples of Ukrainian prose, the authors analyze the impact of the war on the fate of individuals and their families. However, the theme goes far beyond the literary text and touches on important social and political issues facing Ukraine today. The authors understand prose as one of the narratives of culture, which not only conceptualizes reality in a certain way, but also has a real impact on social attitudes. Contemporary Ukrainian prose about the war in the Donbass analyzes many stereotypes about the inhabitants of eastern Ukraine, shows them in their complicated family relationships, and also takes up one of the most universal literary motifs, namely the figure of the house in the face of a disruption of its everyday order. Characteristic of this prose is the individualized perspective, which aims not only to present events on a broad political level, but above all to draw attention to the impact of these events on the individual. Such an individualized perspective is an effective means of reaching the recipient and making him aware of the multidimensionality of the military conflict taking place before our eyes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a reaction to the heated debate on the occasion of Peter Handke's Nobel Prize in 2019. It tries to reveal three problem areas found most notably in his "travelogues" on Yugoslavia, Winterliche Reise and Sommerlicher Nachtrag. The first is that in their strategic one- sidedness, they gloss over the issues of organized violence in Bosnia and especially the responsibility for the genocide of Srebrenica rather than revealing anything else—a literary ventriloquism of his nationalist Serbian "informants." Second, the article explores the extent to which Handke's writings develop Balkan stereotyping as a fantasy dreamworld to "poeticize" reality and create an ersatz- belonging for his torn identity. Finally, the article looks at the Austrian "inability to mourn," deconstructing Handke's positions by connecting him to one of the primal scenes of Austria's Second Republic, the scandal revolving around the wartime activities of the presidential candidate Kurt Waldheim in 1986 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The internationality of the expressionist avant-garde, which has been frequently underestimated by scholars, is above all evidenced by the extensive body of translations of the socalled expressionist decade (1910-1920). During First World War translation became a strategic medium for pacifist writers to mark their distance from prescribed patriotism. This phenomenon is perhaps best described as ›clandestine authorship‹. It characterises also one of the most productive translators among the Expressionists, Alfred Henschke, known as Klabund (1890-1928), and his anthology of Chinese war songs, Dumpfe Trommel und berauschtes Gong (Muffled Drum and Intoxicated Gong, 1915). The aim of the present paper is to examine exemplarily this anthology and to show how Klabund in the disguise of his translator role distances himself from his earlier war-affirmative poetry. The following paper thus provides a contribution to the study of expressionist translation during World War I, to the internationality of the German avant-garde and to the changing attitude of German intellectuals from war enthusiasm to war criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysing Albert Smith's and Charley Dickens's 1858 and 1860 trips to the sites of the Second Anglo-Chinese War, the article suggests that the experience of war, especially of wars fought abroad, is characterised by affective unease and epistemological breakdowns. Smith and Dickens enact war tourism in Hong Kong, Canton and Shanghai as they perform incongruous and tone-deaf cross-cultural relations in a 'theatre of war'. Similarly, contemporary novels reveal the complicated entanglements of the Sino-British (opium) relationship as writers try to make sense of a world in which cultural contact is fraught with violence and cognition is brought to its limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article chronicles the way book covers on American novels about the Vietnam War, both during and after the conflict, not only reflect the world of New York graphic design from 1960 onward but also mirror the United States' internal cultural struggle with the war. Having surveyed over 350 book covers, from high literary to war pulp fiction, the article concludes that only after two decades was the United States prepared to consider the Vietnam War thoughtfully, and even then it leaned toward erasure of rather than confrontation with it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on several literature on the China-Japan War that was published since the 1970s. The overview of an article by Marius B. Jensen on Japanese imperialism is presented. The author also highlights the book "Diplomats in Crisis: United States-Chinese-Japanese Relations 1919-1941," edited by Richard Dean Burns and Edward M. Bennett.

This essay addresses a widespread misperception in mainstream thinking about Japanese views of their World War II record. Popular works, such as Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking, tend to speak of a monolithic Japanese view of the war today. This article, through an analysis of the exhibits and descriptive literature of Japanese "war" and "peace" museums as well as recent struggles over how to depict Japan's wartime record in school textbooks, disagrees. Rather than a unified "Japanese" view of the war, the reality is a struggle in which conservatives and right-wingers duel with moderates and leftists over the "correct history" of the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an article on the emergence of literature on the war of 1812. Emergence of publications on the military history of the war; Details on the creation of books related to officers and men who participated in the war; Information on publications related to the theaters of operations in the war.

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 reconsiders Nathaniel Hawthorne's Civil War memoir, "Chiefly About War-Matters. By a Peaceable Man" (1862), in light of the radical transformation of the federal state under Lincoln. While critics have long recognized Hawthorne's political resistance to--and ironic deflation of--Union patriotism, I situate "War-matters" in a Union political culture of censorship aimed at repressing treasonous discourse. Hawthorne's account of his visit to the front lines analyzes the transformation of the wartime state and provides--through self-conscious parodies of Unionist censorship--new models for literary production and interpretation to engage the "state of exception." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how La ragazza con la Leica (The Girl with the Leica) (2017) by Helena Janeczek implicates photography in a continuous motion from production, human practice, and technical work to circulation and use of the photo-image where forms of untruths--fabrications, manipulation, deception, fiction, conjectures--disclose the authority and essence of an existence. Janeczek retells the story of Gerda Taro--the young German Jewish photographer who died in the Spanish Civil War, and who was Robert Capa's lover-- through a combination of narrative layers, games of mirrors, and coincidences. In La ragazza con la Leica, veracity and invention interlock on two main levels: on the level of the protagonists' personal and professional lives and on the level of the photographs in the text. In the book, writing and photography diachronically collaborate in the retrieval and construction of life and history through forms of un-truths--or other truths-- that reveal lost, forgotten, or unseen realities and, eventually, auto/biographical coincidences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on interwar writings of W. H. Auden such as book "The Orators: An English Study" and project of individual and national formation is repeatedly linked to an intelligence of one's enemies. It mentions generation of British lyric poetry and memoirs is that it shows how war has entered into the various ways we apprehend, express, or practice a shared culture. It also mentions George Orwell used to critique Auden for his inauthentic relation to violence.

Owen's rejection of Horace's dulce et decorum est pro patria mori as 'the old lie' prompts for me two questions: 1) Who exactly does Owen think lied? And is he justified in thinking this? 2) To what extent does Owen's rejection of Horace's words also amount to a critique of the classical tradition more generally, on the grounds that classical conceptions of war and heroism have proved utterly inadequate to the task of articulating the horrors of twentieth-century trench warfare? I argue that Owen's main target is a number of poets, including Jessie Pope and Henry Newbolt, who recruited sanitized receptions of the classics to exhort young men to lay down their lives for their country. However, it is not clear that any of these, or Horace himself, is actually lying. Owen as a keen student of Roman and Greek culture employed classical themes in various poems. Although classical literature offered rich and nuanced conceptions of warfare, its emphasis on the supererogatory and named individual heroes meant that new conceptions of heroism needed to be developed in World War I to cope with the conditions of often anonymous industrialized trench warfare, in which even doing one's duty could seem heroic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modernist poet H.D.'s experimental translation of Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis (1916), published during WWI, shows H.D. pursuing this project to explore how wartime can provide opportunity for women to achieve extraordinary cultural authority in positions not generally afforded women, such as those of direct witness, storyteller and news-bringer, and heroic sacrificial victim. This translation project both registered and fostered the emergence of H.D.'s feminist queer thought about how 'New Women' of her time might come of age differently from women of generations past — through new narratives, new varieties of authority, and new forms of maturity. Finally, the essay complicates received ideas about H.D.'s 'pacifist' and critical stance on war, reading her translation choices as structured by an ambivalent fascination with both wartime 'beauty' and forms of advancement made distinctively possible for women by the circumstances of war. [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]

The way that the First World War would be remembered was yet to be solidified in the years immediately after the Armistice and peace treaties. Using key case studies from the years 1918 to 1930 by combatant authors Gilbert Frankau, Ernest Raymond, C.E. Montague, R.C. Sherriff and Richard Aldington, this article charts the development of the complex relationship between the dominant heroic mode and emergent modern disenchantment. Theories of social remembering provide a valuable framework for understanding the social processes by which disenchantment became a, if not the, widely-held memory of the conflict, reaching acceptance in the War Books Boom that followed the dual successes of Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen Nichts Neues, first serialized on the tenth anniversary of the armistice, and Sherriff's Journey's End, first performed the following month. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Toward the close of the bleak war year of 1915 in the Great War, a charity to aid Belgian refugee children, the Vestiare Marie Josef, solicited contributions for a gift book from authors and artists with recognizable names to attract subscribers. It was titled King Albert's Book. In Shaw's contribution, a fantasy, "The Emperor and the Little Girl," the Kaiser encounters a little Belgian girl at night on a field in Flanders ravaged by shellfire. This article gives details and connects the 1916 tale, an intriguing and ironical anti-war story, to 1923, when Shaw would write Saint Joan, perhaps not recalling as he penned its epilogue that he had foreshadowed some of its crucial elements in a children's fantasy for a wartime Belgian charity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article profiles novelist Henry Green whose wartime novel's are being reissued by the New York Review Books. Green wrote and published "Blindness" in his final year of study at Oxford University. He also published three novels before his death in 1973 including "Concluding", "Nothing" and "Doting".

Sleep Has His House, one of Anna Kavan’s most radically experimental novels, appeared in Britain in 1948, in the wake of the Second World War. An objection levied at the novel on its publication was that it bore no relationship to external ‘reality’. However, this article argues that the novel’s focus on the oneiric realm, contrary to what hostile contemporary reviews claimed, does not take place in isolation of larger society. Portraying modernist, surrealist and psychoanalytical influences, the novel is namely concerned with the representation of a nocturnal realm that emphasizes the osmotic relationship between the external world and an individual’s subjectivity. Focusing on the ways in which violent images of war infiltrate the dream world, this article suggests thatSleep Has His Housecan in fact be understood as reflecting and responding to the pressures of British war-torn society in the mid twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that the 1991 Gulf War had a deep transformative effect on Saudi Arabia. It aims to analyze the extent to which this war brought about major ideological changes to a society seemingly deemed unchangeable. Through the study of three Saudi novels which drew on this war as a source of creative and political inspiration, this study brings to life Saudi people's discussions, dilemmas, and reactions to the crumbling of the edifice of Arab unity and the emergence of "America" in its place as the "savior" from the evil of Saddam Hussein. We contend that despite resistance from various conservative elements of Saudi society, the winds of change brought by this war could not be resisted. The novels under study skillfully portray the events of this war not as battlefield accounts, but as accounts of a society wrestling with an irresistible wind of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews essays published in the issue of the journal including one by Christopher Hunter on the loyalism of Reverend William Smith during the American Revolutionary War, another by Rachel Trocchio on the rhetoric of author Peter Oliver, and one by John Garcia on the resettlement of loyalist Stephen Burroughs in Canada.

The article explores the literary aspects of Toryism during the American Revolution in the book "Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion," by Peter Oliver. The author proposes a homology between the subjunctive mood and Loyalist poetics. Emphasis is also given to topics such as the grammatical aspects of counterrevolutionary rhetoric, counterfactualism, and the relationship between morality and social order.

The article explores the political and social views of Anglican Reverend William Smith on republican resistance to American independence from Great Britain during the Revolutionary War. The author reflects on the literary influence on Smith of the play "Cato" by Joseph Addison and the essay series "Cato's Letters." Emphasis is also given to topics such as the role of slavery in Smith's ideology, Smith's use of the pseudonym Cato in published letters, and the rhetorical tactic of attribution.

A literary criticism of the Augustan reconstruction for the Punic Wars between the Rome, Italy and Carthage is presented. It outlines the literary works of the various Augustan authors including Virgil, Livy, and Horace. An overview of the politics of the cities, works of the author E. L. Harrison, and urban development of the cities is also given.

A decade after the end of Israel's 2006 war on Lebanon, I spotlight the hitherto under-researched literary portrayals of the conflict. Following an overview of the immediate and (then-) innovative media tools and techniques used to capture its momentum--blogging, video-making, and online comics--and of Arabic-, French-, and English-language literary writings referring to the war, I focus on how literature, which requires time for its "contents" to be distilled into a form removed from emotional immediacy, succeed not only in reflecting it but also in reflecting on it through various fictional(izing) prisms. I do so by comparing the methodologies adopted by Nada Awar Jarrar's A Good Land and Abbas El-Zein's Leave to Remain: A Memoir, both published in 2009, and by arguing that they share a sense of guilt and hence exhibit an ethical exigency by incorporating particular discourses to mediate and mediatize this war as crisis: the social/humanitarian in A Good Land and the visual/photographic in Leave to Remain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented which discusses various reports within the issue on topics including wartime writing, Ford Madox Ford's tetralogy novel "Parade's End," and wartime correspondence of short story writer Katherine Mansfield.

Two debates arose in postwar Japan over the wartime responsibility of Japanese intellectuals. The first broke out in 1946 between two groups dominating the literary field at the time: the Orthodox-Marxist Shin Nihon bungakukai (New Japan Literary Association) and the "modernist" Kindai bungakukai (Modern Literature Association). The second arose in 1956 between members of the New Japan Literary Association and a group of New Left sympathisers organised around the journal Arechi (Waste Land). These two debates reflect the tensions affecting the literary field at the time and the "battle for symbolic capital". By examining the socio-political context surrounding the debates, this article highlights the different positions of each group and reveals the fragmentation and infighting that characterized the intellectual field of postwar Japan. [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]

Literature written during and after World War II expresses an important ecological shift in human perception towards the concern for the environment. Prior to that writers and poets expressed the celebrated role of nature often expressed in Romanticism. A shift in focus was noticed in the absurdist texts written, between the 1940s and 1950s. The writers belonging to the absurd school of thought hinted at an ecological crisis that people were dimly aware of but a serious concern that was slowly paving ground. Ecology outlines the fundamental principle that everything and everyone in this universe is connected. Based on this principle, the paper offers an exposure of how a new concern for the ecology emerged in the absurdist text of the 1940s and 1950s, portraying the troubled relationship between the ecology and man. The paper also traces the atrocity on animals and nature during the two World Wars and how the strangeness of the universe affected the ‘other than human’ forms on planet earth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pat Barker's novel Double Vision (2003) addresses the ethics and aesthetics of witnessing and representing suffering in the context of recent hyper-mediated 'postmodern' wars (Bosnia, Afghanistan) and a global audience anaesthetized by spectacular excess. Her compelling exploration of the aesthetics of violence against issues of value, morality, shared humanity and truth, and the way she responds to them by weighing the potential of different art forms, provide a forceful poetic statement of the ethical possibilities of peace. As the protagonists confront the moral choices underlying the narrative, visual and ideological challenges of rendering the 'unsayable' and the 'unwatchable', relationality, partnership, emotional commitment, poetic truth and affect emerge as key steps towards viable responses to the experience of evil informing human life and art alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]