The Routledge Introduction to American War Literature
Routledge Introductions to American Literature Series

War and violence have arguably been some of the strongest influences on literature, but the relation is complex: more than just a subject for story-telling, war tends to reshape literature and culture. Modern war literature necessarily engages with national ideologies, and this volume looks at the specificity of how American literature deals with the emotional, intellectual, social, political, and economic contradictions that evolve into and out of war. Raising questions about how American ideals of independence and gender affect representations of war while also considering how specifically American experiences of race and class interweave with representations of combat, this book is a rich and coherent introduction to these texts and critical debates.

Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1 Literature of the American Indian Wars and the Revolutionary War; 2 Literature of the American Civil War; 3 Literature of World War I; 4 Literature of World War II; 5 Literature of the wars in Korea and Viet Nam; 6 Literature of the wars in the Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan; Bibliography; Index

Jennifer Haytock is Professor of English at The College at Brockport, SUNY. Her work includes At Home, At War: Domesticity and World War I in American Literature, two other monographs, and articles on Ernest Hemingway, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and novels about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.