The Edinburgh companion to twentieth-century British and American war literature

Abstract

The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American Literature. Edited by Adam Piette and Mark Rawlinson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (distributed by Oxford UP USA), 2012. 590 pp. £150.00 cloth.Critics of the literature and culture of face a formidable challenge. How are they to insist on the relevance of warfare beyond the ends of particular conflicts, while resisting the tendency of modern discourse to explain everything modern through the lens of permanent, perpetual war? It is all too familiar an experience to see books shelved and the terrible human lessons about militarism learned rapidly forgotten, as wars get bracketed off as states of exception. Conversely, the insights of literary critics have a hard time competing with the expertise of pundits of high tech warfare or of the war makers themselves, in a culture which still puts a premium on our collective fantasies about combat experience.Adam Piette and Mark Rawlinson have risen to the challenge by offering a remarkably ambitious, richly satisfying, and wide ranging edited collection of essays that pretty much defines this emerging field of study. Both comprehensive survey and incisive intervention into the study of modern and contemporary transatlantic literature, The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American Literature gathers together an extraordinary range of expertise in five editors' introduc- tions and fifty seven tightly written chapters. The result is an exhilarating, provocative, sometimes uneven but endlessly diverting read, which will become essential for both specialist and generalist scholars alike. The edi- tors, both authors of ground-breaking criticism on the British literature of World II, make clear the critical ambition of the work in their Intro- ductions to the volume's five Parts: Wars and their Literatures; Bodies, Behaviour, Cultures; Technology; Spaces; and Genres. They set the tone and expectations for the volume by zeroing in on key debates within the field, targeting influential theorists and supplementing the contributors' essays with brief case studies drawn from conflicts since 9/11.Piette and Rawlinson emphasize certain compelling through-lines for both the volume and future study in this field. Their claim for the im- portance of literature is on ethical grounds:War makes literature ethical in this strict sense: the spectacle and imagining of the death of others in state-sponsored conflicts demands writing that pays due witness to that suffering, accompanies that suffering with the attention due to extreme and lethal experience, and accomplishes repre- sentations of that suffering without recourse to the usual contractual conventions that govern polite engagement with a sophisticated or jaded readership. (2)The centre of gravity of their argument is a highly productive pragmatics of genre, rather than a theorization of violence: War tends to alter the genres it inhabits, like a cuckoo in the nest. It stretches and distorts the normal obligations and expectations, and gives the genre a special ethical edge, as well as menace and dark intention (6). More contentiously, in their final Introduction they observe: War exerts pressure on all genres by politiciz- ing them (inevitably since is a political act), by infiltrating into their forms of representation the morbidity of its themes...and by propagandizing itself into everything it touches, however hermetically sealed and peace- able (475). The potential limitation of such an approach, however, is that it may remain in the realm of the ethical, of the more privatized literary imagination, rather than considering the specific political consequences of representational or critical strategies.What's missing from the volume's conceptual framework is a sustained discussion or theorization of war culture, despite the editors' frequent reliance on this concept. …