Sacrifice and Modern War Writing

Atavisms, Martyrdoms, and Economies of Loss

Alex Houen author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:27th Aug '24

£88.00

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Sacrifice and Modern War Writing cover

Sacrifice and Modern War Writing presents the most extensive study to date of twentieth- and twenty-first-century war writing. Examining works by over 110 authors, Alex Houen surveys how war writing explores sacrifice in relation to major modern and contemporary conflicts, from the First World War to the War on Terror. Various conceptions of sacrifice are examined, including Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and secular. The discussion ranges across literary portrayals of multiple sacrificial practices, including ancient rituals of child sacrifice, martyrdom, scapegoating, and suicide bombing. Houen builds an innovative interdisciplinary approach to how war, sacrifice, and their representations interrelate, and a wide range of Anglophone literature is discussed, including novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, manifestoes, elegies, ballads, and lyric poetry. Whereas critics and theorists have tended to emphasize that war's reality exceeds any attempt to represent it, Houen contends that political, religious, and cultural frames of sacrifice have continued to play a significant part in shaping how war's reality is shaped and experienced. Those frames are inextricably tied to modes of representation, which include symbolism and mimesis. Sacrifice and Modern War Writing explores how sacrificial killing in war is itself riddled with symbolic transfigurations and mimetic exchanges, and it builds a fresh approach by arguing that the figurative and imaginative aspects of literary writing ironically become its very means of engaging closely with the reality of war's sacrifices. That approach also develops by using the literary analyses to critique and revise various prominent theories of sacrifice and war.

Sacrifice and Modern War Writing examines an impressive range of writers (over forty in each of its three Parts), and develops its readings with superb use of a wide range of theory from Derrida, Agamben, Butler, Girard, Paul Kahn, Levinas, Nietzsche, and others. This is an outstanding, wide-ranging, utterly original meditation on war as it impacted citizens and culture, dwelling on the victims and martyrs of the sacrifice complex and discovering the lineaments of resistance in what it finds at the heart of the war writers' ethical drive: 'an egalitarian imaginary counter to war's violent sacrifices'. * Adam Piette, author of Imagination at War and The Literary Cold War *

ISBN: 9780198912286

Dimensions: 241mm x 162mm x 23mm

Weight: 660g

336 pages