Abstract
Abstract This chapter examines US war fiction from the Second World War to the twenty-first century’s “Global War on Terror.” Arguing against a critical tradition that regards war fiction as either disreputable or simply the product of exceptional wartimes, the chapter uses the idea of the palimpsest to illuminate three different kinds of US war stories: representations of the war machine as a totalizing system, often of imperial ambition and reach; war as a romance that offers access to privileged forms of knowledge and a crucible for masculinity; and war as a societal struggle that reveals domestic battles around race, class, and gender. Reading postwar US war fiction in this light challenges narratives of US war culture that focus narrowly on the individual trauma of the heroicized soldier or veteran.
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