Sacrifice and Modern War Writing

Abstract

Abstract This book surveys how Anglophone war writing explores sacrifice in relation to major conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the First World War; the Irish ‘Easter Rising’ and Anglo-Irish War; the Spanish Civil War; the Second World War; the Vietnam War; the Cold War; and the War on Terror. Various conceptions of sacrifice are examined, including Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and secular, and the discussion ranges across literary portrayals of multiple sacrificial practices, including martyrdom, scapegoating, and ancient practices of child sacrifice. Writings by over 110 authors are discussed, and the book builds an interdisciplinary approach to how war, sacrifice, and their representations interrelate. A wide range of literature is analysed, including novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, manifestoes, elegies, ballads, and lyric poetry. The survey develops chronologically across the book’s three Parts: Part I, on Reprising Ancient Sacrifice in Modern War; Part II on Militant Martyrdoms; and Part III, on Sacrifice’s Gifts and Prices – the latter having a particular focus on secular economizations of sacrifice. While critics and theorists have tended to emphasize that war’s reality exceeds any attempt to represent it, the central contention of this book is 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. The book explores how sacrificial killing in war is itself riddled with symbolic transfigurations and mimetic exchanges, and it develops a novel 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.