Combat Death in Contemporary American Culture

A remarkable achievement. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet offers readers a profound, eloquent, and haunting reflection on the relationship between war and American culture.

-- Andrew Bacevich, author of America's War for the Greater Middle East

For all of us drugged by American war culture, this book comes as a Prince Charming to awaken us from our treacherous fantasies. Dr. Monnet’s dissection of the genre conventions that control our emotional responses to war stories is stunningly brilliant. Her exploration of how the conventions of melodrama and horror fiction now tend to undermine the intentions of many would-be antiwar works is truly eye-opening. The book has made me rethink many works I thought I understood well, and it would be a treasure chest for a variety of courses. Anyone seeking to free us from our culture of war must read the invaluable volume.

-- H. Bruce Franklin, professor emeritus, Rutgers University; author of Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War

It was said that the Civil War photographer Mathew Brady changed America forever by laying the battlefield dead at the people’s doorsteps. In her unflinching study, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet shows how the battlefield victims of America’s “war culture” have increasingly dominated the imagery of literature and film since the end of the Second World War—to a degree that Brady’s contemporaries could scarcely have imagined. Theoretically informed, richly illustrated, and driven as much by a hatred of war as by the awareness of its perverse seduction, this book magisterially builds upon the insights of Richard Slotkin’s classic Regeneration through Violence.

-- Will Kaufman, author of The Civil War in American Culture and American Culture in the 1