War and Literature: Looking Back on 20th Century Armed Conflicts

Luiz Gustavo Vieira, Volker Jaeckel, Elcio Cornelsen, Tom Burns

• Publisher: ibidem
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9783838266176
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Index: Literature

This comprehensive volume analyzes the radical change in the nature of armed conflicts and in the way they are narrated and represented. Ever since the First World War has changed war itself, rendering meaningless the very vocabulary of war in terms such as "e;battle"e;, "e;front"e;, "e;non-combatant"e;, "e;open city"e; and "e;hero"e;, new words, new approaches, new theories and new texts had to be invented. The enemy became invisible: Submarines, tanks, mines, gas, long-range artillery, and airplanes made this war different from all the other that came before. A hundred years after the beginning of this terrible war, it is now time to recall different representations of the armed conflicts of the 20th century. The articles in this collection analyze representations of the Canudos Civil War in Brazil, the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the colonial wars in Africa, and the war in Afghanistan, aiming to understand how war and the telling of war have changed during the most murderous hundred years in the history of mankind.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• Introduction to Revisiting Twentieth Century Wars
• Hunters turned into Prey: Predation in Twentieth Century War Literature
• Through an Enemy Land: On Space and (In)visibility in Euclides da Cunha's Os sertões
• War Imagery: On the First Edition of Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel
• La Gran Guerra Europea: Germanophobia and the Horrors of War in the Novels of Blasco Ibañez and their Film Adaptations
• The American Narrative of the Second World War
• Guilt in Echolot by Walter Kempowski
• Towards a Definition of a War Orphan Literature
• Dead on a High Hill: Poetry from the Korean War
• Tim O’Brien Recounts Traumatic Memories of American Vietnam Combatants
• Collective Traumas and Common Memories: the Colonial War of Portugal in Africa and European Violence of the Twentieth Century
• The Dark Song of the Night of War. António Lobo Antunes’ Os Cus de Judas
• Identity and Otherness in Balkan Films about the War in ex-Yugoslavia
• Struggle for Authenticity: Autobiographical Accounts and Non-Fiction Books on the War in Afghanistan