Sacrifice and Modern War Literature From the Battle of Waterloo to the War on Terror

by Houen, Alex; Schramm, Jan-Melissa

• ISBN13: 9780198806516
• ISBN10: 0198806515
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2018-08-28
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Sacrifice and Modern War Literature is the first book to explore how writers from the early nineteenth century to the present have addressed the intimacy of sacrifice and war. It has been common for critics to argue that after the First World War many of the cultural and religious values associated with sacrifice have been increasingly rejected by writers and others. However, this volume shows that literature has continued to address how different conceptions of sacrifice have been invoked in times of war to convert losses into gains or ideals. While those conceptions have sometimes been rooted in a secular rationalism that values lost lives in terms of political or national victories, spiritual and religious conceptions of sacrifice are also still in evidence, as with the 'martyrdom operations' of jihadis fighting against the 'war on terror'.

Each chapter presents fresh insights into the literature of a particular conflict and the contributions explore major war writers including Wordsworth, Kipling, Ford Madox Ford, and Elizabeth Bowen, as well as lesser known authors such as Dora Sigerson, Richard Aldington, Thomas Kinsella, and Nadeem Aslam. The volume covers multiple genres including novels, poetry (particularly elegy and lyric), memoirs, and some films. The contributions address a rich array of topics related to wartime sacrifice including scapegoating, martyrdom, religious faith, tragedy, heroism, altruism, 'bare life', atonement, and redemption.

Author Biography

Alex Houen, University Senior Lecturer, and Fellow of Pembroke College, University of Cambridge,Jan-Melissa Schramm, University Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Fellow of Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge

Alex Houen is a University Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature in the Faculty of English, and Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford University Press, 2002), editor of States of War since 9/11: Terrorism, Sovereignty, and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2014), and co-editor (with Dominic Janes) of Martyrdom and Terrorism: Pre-Modern to Contemporary Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2014). He also co-edits (with Adam Piette) the international poetry journal Blackbox Manifold.

Jan-Melissa Schramm is a University Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature in the Faculty of English, and Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge. She is the author of Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Censorship, Dramatic Form, and the Representation of the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century England (forthcoming), and co-editor of Fictions of Knowledge: Fact, Evidence, Doubt (Macmillan, 2011).

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Wordsworth, Waterloo, and Sacrifice, Philip Shaw
2. 'I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy': The Crimean War and the 'Inspiration' of (Self-) Sacrifice in mid-Victorian Fiction, Jan-Melissa Schramm
3. The Indian Mutiny and the Blood of Sacrifice, Christopher Herbert
4. The Poetics of American Civil War Sacrifice, Randall Fuller
5. Character, Sacrifice, and Scapegoats: Boer War Fiction, Steve Attridge
6. Bare Death: The Failing Sacrifice of the Great War, Vincent Sherry
7. 'Freely Proffered'?: The Deaths of Rupert Brooke and Julian Grenfell, Tim Kendall
8. 'A bit of shrapnel': The Sigerson Shorters, the Hardys, Yeats and the Easter Rising, Matthew Campbell
9. The Penny's Mighty Sacrifice: The Spanish Civil War and Left Poetics, Ian Patterson
10. The Motif of Sacrifice in the Literature and Culture of the Second World War, Mark Rawlinson
11. 'It is the poems you have lost': Poetry and Sacrifice during the Second World War, Helen Goethals
12. Sacrifice and the Inner Organs of the Cold War Citizen, Adam Piette
13. The Vietnam War, American Remembering, and the Measure of Sacrifice, Fifty Years Later, Philip Beidler
14. 'Atrocities Against His Sacred Poet': The Orpheus Myth and the Poetry of the Northern Irish Troubles, David Wheatley
15. Reckoning Sacrifice in 'War on Terror' Literature, Alex Houen