Essays & Studies 2014: War and Literature

Essays & Studies 2014: War and Literature, edited by Laura Ashe and Ian Patterson

War was the first subject of literature; at times, war has been its only subject. In this volume, the contributors reflect on the uneasy yet symbiotic relations of war and writing, from medieval to modern literature. War writing emerges in multiple forms, celebratory and critical, awed and disgusted; the rhetoric of inexpressibility fights its own battle with the urgent necessity of representation, record and recognition. This is shown to be true even to the present day: whether mimetic or metaphorical, literature that concerns itself overtly or covertly with the real pressures of war continues to speak to issues of pressing significance, and to provide some clues to the intricate entwinement of war with contemporary life. Particular topics addressed include writings of and about the Crusades and battles during the Hundred Years War; Shakespeare’s “Casus Belly”; Auden’s “Journal of an Airman”; and War and Peace.

Ian Patterson is a poet, critic and translator. He teaches English at Queens’ College, Cambridge. Laura Ashe is Associate Professor of English and a Tutorial Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford.

Preface
Acts of Vengeance, Acts of Love: Crusading Violence in the Twelfth Century
Peril, Flight and the Sad Man: Medieval Theories of the Body in Battle
‘Is This War?’: British Fictions of Emergency in the Hot Cold War
Crossing the Rubicon: History, Authority and Civil War in Twelfth-Century England
‘The Reader myghte lamente’: the sieges of Calais (1346) and Rouen (1418) in chronicle, poem and play
Shakespeare’s Casus Belly…
Unnavigable Kinship in a Time of Conflict: Loyalist Calligraphies, Sovereign Power and the ‘Muckle Honor’ of Elizabeth Murray Inman
Proclaiming the War News: Richard Caton Woodville and Herman Melville
A Feeling for Numbers: Representing the Scale of the War Dead
The Guilt of the Noncombatant and W. H. Auden’s ‘Journal of an Airman’