Arms and the Woman

War, Gender, and Literary Representation

Helen M. Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich, Susan Merrill Squier, Helen M. Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich, Susan Merrill Squier

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN:
  9780807842560
  9780807818602
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807868140
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Although the themes of women’s complicity in and resistance to war have been part of literature from early times, they have not been fully integrated into conventional conceptions of the war narrative. Combining feminist literary criticism with the emerging field of feminist war theory, this collection explores the role of gender as an organizing principle in the war system and reveals how literature perpetuates the ancient myth of “arms and the man.”

The volume shows how the gendered conception of war has both shaped literary texts and formed the literary canon. It identifies and interrogates the conventional war text, with its culturally determined split between warlike men and peaceful women, and it confirms that women’s role in relation to war is much more complex and complicitous than such essentializing suggests. The contributors examine a wide range of familiar texts from fresh perspectives and bring new texts to light. Collectively, these essays range in time from the Trojan War to the nuclear age.

The contributors are June Jordan, Lorraine Helms, Patricia Francis Cholakian, Jane E. Schultz, Margaret R. Higonnet, James Longenbach, Laura Stempel Mumford, Sharon O'Brien, Jane Marcus, Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Susan Schweik, Carol J. Adams, Esther Fuchs, Barbara Freeman, Gillian Brown, Helen M. Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich, and Susan Merrill Squier.

Index

• Achebe, Chinua, 17–21, 23
• Adams, Carol J., xviii, 244–67
• Addams, Jane, 289
• Aeneid (Virgil), 9–10, 27–28
• Air with Armed Men (Simpson), 238
• “Alcohol and Meat” (Easterbrook), 246
• Alcott, Louisa May, 82, 87–89, 94
• Aldington, Richard, 136–37
• Aldrich, Mrs. Alfred P., 68
• Alexander’s Bridge (Cather), 187
• All Quiet on the Western Front (Remarque), xvii, 124, 132, 137, 140–44, 149–51, 153–55, 157, 219
• Allston, Elizabeth, 71
• Ambio (journal), 311
• American Woman’s Home, The (Beecher and Stowe), 289–90
• Les Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon (La Fontaine), 48
• Andrews, Mary Raymond Shipman, 187
• “Anecdote of the Golden Age, An” (Brophy), 254–55
• Animal Rights (Salt), 260
• Animals and Why They Matter (Midgley), 257
• Apocalypse, 308–19
• Ardener, Edwin, 261
• Ariadne (Brindel), 254, 255
• Aristophanes, 20
• Arms making: and birth, 9–23
• Arte of Warre, The (Machiavelli), 31
• Arthurian wars, 12–13
• Articulation, right of, 250
• Asian American Literature (Kim), 225
• L’Astrée (Urfé), 44
• Attiwill, Kenneth, 138, 139
• Atwood, Margaret, xviii, 250–52, 260, 262
• Aurora Leigh (Barrett Browning), 14
• Backwash of War (La Motte), 136
• Bagnold, Enid, 126–27
• Bailey, Temple, 187
• Bakhtin, Mikhail, 140, 141, 155
• Barbusse, Henri, 211
• Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. See Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
• Battle: ecsta...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Arms and the Woman
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• War and Memory
• Arms and the Woman: The Con[tra]ception of the War Text
• “Still Wars and Lechery”: Shakespeare and the Last Trojan Woman
• Rewriting History: Madame de Villedieu and the Wars of Religion
• Mute Fury: Southern Women's Diaries of Sherman's March to the Sea, 1864–1865
• Civil Wars and Sexual Territories
• The Women and Men of 1914
• Corpus/Corps/Corpse: Writing the Body in/at War
• May Sinclair's The Tree of Heaven: The Vortex of Feminism, the Community of War
• Combat Envy and Survivor Guilt: Willa Cather's “Manly Battle Yarn”
• “Seeds for the Sowing”: The Diary of Käthe Kollwitz
• A Needle with Mama's Voice: Mitsuye Yamada's Camp Notes and the American Canon of War Poetry
• Feminism, the Great War, and Modern Vegetarianism
• Images of Love and War in Contemporary Israeli Fiction : A Feminist Re-vision
• Nuclear Domesticity: Sequence and Survival
• “Epitaphs and Epigraphs: ‘The End(s) of Man’”
• A Bibliography of Secondary Sources
• The Contributors
• Index