War Fiction Research Articles

The Silent Unseen and Underground Soldiers: Polish–Ukrainian Conflicts and Collaboration in Amanda McCrina’s Second World War Fiction

The memory of the Second World War remains a bone of contention between Poland and Ukraine. The countries’ mnemonic discourses differ significantly, especially regarding the legacy of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Most local children’s and young adult authors avoid discussing historical nuances and offer their readers simple narratives about victims and oppressors. Thus, it is remarkable that in the last few years descriptions of the difficult Polish–Ukrainian relations have appeared in fiction written by Anglophone authors. This article considers the representations of the complex Ukrainian–Polish/Polish–Ukrainian dynamics in Amanda McCrina’s Traitor (2020) and The Silent Unseen (2022), two young adult novels set in Second World War eastern Poland/western Ukraine. McCrina, an American of Polish descent, introduces teenage protagonists with liminal identities and agency limited by their historical circumstances. This article underscores the importance of McCrina’s literary techniques – especially her use of alternation of perspectives – that highlight the complexity of history and challenge the discourse of morality typical of young adult historical fiction. Moreover, it argues that the minor simplifications introduced by McCrina are necessary for Anglophone young readers to grasp the entanglements of the history of what Timothy Snyder termed the ‘Bloodlands’. Thus, her approach to addressing multifaceted and problematic topics exceeds morality plots based on the victim–oppressor binary.

The Postmodern Narrative Techniques in Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story"

The Vietnam War had an irreversible negative impact on the United States, Vietnam, and the world at large. Its effects extended beyond geopolitics and seeped into the domain of literature, where numerous works have profoundly depicted and contemplated the conflict. Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story" stands as a prime example of such literature, set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. Drawing on Jean-Franois Lyotard's theory of postmodern metanarratives, this paper examines how O'Brien employs postmodern narrative techniques that diverge from traditional grand narratives to articulate the essence of his war fiction. Upon analysis, the paper contends that Tim O'Brien adopts the narrative mode of metafiction, blending narrative and commentary texts alongside real and fictive elements. By doing so, he seeks to alert readers to the constructed nature of both the textual and real worlds, encouraging them to perceive war through the lens of individuals' traumatic war experiences.

Battling Binaries: The Psychosocial Endurance of Gender Constructs in West Asian War Fiction

The archetypes of the heroic soldier and the caring mother, which dominate thesocial imaginary of war, reflect the essentially gendered nature of war discourse. However,violent masculinity and gentle femininity, though essential to the war discourse, are notbiological qualities but cultural constructions. The hegemonic “war story,” as Miriam Cookerefers to it, is built on these binaries of masculinity/femininity, civilian/combatant,home/front, etc. However, in postcolonial wars, these binaries are complicated by both theinclusion of women as combatants and the technological advancements that enable thepervasion of war into homes, endangering civilians just as much as combatants. In thisarticle, I will examine how select contemporary West Asian fictional narratives depict the warexperience of gendered subjects in occupied or war-torn territories like Iraq and Palestine.Exploring these texts in the light of war studies conducted by Miriam Cooke and Joshua S.Goldstein reveals that, despite the changing face of the new wars and the subversion ofgender binaries, psycho-social impacts of conventional gender roles persist. Men depicted inthe selected fictional texts continue to bear the pressure to protect and to resist violence usingviolence. Women’s changing roles in the new wars expose them to similar violence ascombatants, but the lack of social recognition metes out a double jeopardy, whereby they aresurvivors of war’s violence yet are denied the honour or aftercare received by malecombatants of war.

Deformations in translating modern Ukrainian war fiction into English – A psycholinguistic study of "Інтернат"/<i>The Orphanage</i> by Serhiy Zhadan

The article is focused on analysing linguistic deformations in translating modern Ukrainian war fiction into English. The research material is the novel "Інтернат"/ The Orphanage by Serhiy Zhadan and its translation into English. Translation deformations, or "deforming tendencies" (Berman, 2000), are viewed as systemic psycholinguistic distortions, arbitrary and non-arbitrary, of formal and content source text characteristics. Three main groups of translation deformations have been identified in the text under analysis - lexical, stylistic, and grammatical. Lexical deformations include calque translation, concretisation and modulation. Due to their low frequency, they are not viewed as typical. Stylistic deformations fall into synonymous substitution, logisation, explication, expressivation, modernisation, antonymous translation, and compensation. Synonymous substitution and logisation are the most frequent types; therefore, they may be considered prototypical. They are mainly concerned with reproducing characters’ names and descriptions, names or descriptions of military and civil vehicles and tools, colloquial expressions and 'surzhyk'. Grammatical deformations constitute the most significant group. They comprise substitutions and permutations of different types, deletion of words/phrases/sentences, addition of words/phrases, and changes in punctuation. The style of Serhiy Zhadan is characterised by specific syntactical-stylistic features, such as the tendency to use extremely long sentences, high frequency of repetitions of different types, and specific punctuation. Therefore, deleting repetitions, intensifiers, discourse markers, and even sentences is the most recurrent type of grammatical deformation, followed by substitution–division of sentences, which may be treated as prototypical grammatical deformations in the analysed text. Disclosure Statement The authors reported no potential conflicts of interest. * Corresponding author: Diana Kalishchuk, 0000-0003-1952-5176diana.kalishchuk@vnu.edu.ua

Representation of World War One in Pre-Revolutionary Cinema in the Context of Russian Philosophy and Journalism of the Early Twentieth Century

The article examines the representation of World War One in Russian pre-revolutionary cinema. The author introduces a typology of war fiction films and analyzes its transformation from 1914 to 1916, focusing on the evolution of the enemy portrayal. To account for the appearance of certain screen images, the general historical and cultural context is described. Particular attention is paid to the works of Russian philosophers (N. Berdyaev, V. Rozanov, S. Bulgakov), who wrote about the world war, which would reshape European political and socio-cultural landscapes.

'Kilmalough won't know itself': William Trevor's 'The Ballroom of Romance' as Cold War Fiction

Despite the recent attention of historians to the influence of Cold War politics in and on Ireland, literary scholarship has been more reticent when it comes to reading mid-century Irish writing as part of a broader international field of Cold War fiction. While some work has been conducted to situate individual writers, such as Samuel Beckett and John Banville, within an international political milieu, this essay proposes that the Cold War had a much broader impact on Irish writing than has previously been considered. This essay wades into the possibilities of this proposed area of interest through a reading of the Cold War political undercurrents moving within William Trevor’s 1972 short story ‘The Ballroom of Romance’. The story of Bridie’s disappointing evening in the eponymous dancehall has largely been read as an examination of rural disillusionment within an Ireland facing economic and cultural stagnation. Yet American influence suffuses the story. On the one hand, that influence can be felt in the presence of American cultural importation, or ‘soft power’; on the other hand, that influence can be found in the allusions to the shift in Irish economic policy in the mid-twentieth century away from protectionism and towards foreign investment. The most prominent dream amongst the locals who gather at the Ballroom of Romance – the rumours of American investment in a concrete factory in Kilmalough – places Trevor’s story firmly within the politics of global capitalism at the height of the Cold War in the early 1970s. Recognising that ‘Americanisation’ is bound up with Cold War policy affords the opportunity to read the dreams of rural Ireland within the context of global politics – and the failure of these dreams suggests that the reach of Trevor’s criticism need not necessarily be limited to boundaries of county and nation.

A Thematic Interpretation of Selected Novels Of Tim O Brien

Author from the United States who enlisted in the military during the Vietnam War. “The majority of his works are about Vietnam during the conflict, and his latter works often investigate the life of Vietnam soldiers after the war. O'Brien is perhaps most known for his book, which was published in 1990 and titled The Things They Carried. This book is a compilation of connected semi-autobiographical tales that were inspired by O'Brien's experiences during the war. The latter was referred to be " a masterpiece of modern war fiction" by The New York Times in the year 2010. Going For Cacciato, O'Brien's book about the conflict that was published in 1978 and won the National Book Prize, is another reason for the author's widespread reputation. In spite of the fact that O'Brien is most known for his writings on the Vietnam War, he is also highly regarded as a teacher and instructor of creative writing. From 2003 to 2012, he was the holder of an endowed chair in the Master of Fine Arts programme at Texas State University–San Marcos. The purpose of this article is to provide thematic interpretations on a selection of Tim O'Brien's works.”

The Hero and the Victim: Narratives of Criminality in Iraq War Fiction (book) <br>

The Hero and the Victim: Narratives of Criminality in Iraq War Fiction (book) <br>

『머나먼 쏭바강』에 나타난 비판적 인식의 재고

This paper is premised on the idea that a different meaning or a different set of hermeneutic codes are detectable in Park Yong-han’s The Songba River Far Away than those attributed from a realistic perspective to the novel. It starts with charting the similarities and differences between Park’s novel and the so-called “victim discourse” commonly found in the American Vietnam War fiction, which is reputedly employed in order to exempt American GIs from the responsibilities for the horrendous war crimes. This paper then proceeds to focus on what it deems to be two crucial episodes in the novel in order to tease out alternative meanings from the text. One such episode is found in the relationship between the South Korean patient soldiers and master sergeant Oh, the virtual ruler of the army clinic camp in Vietnam, which this research approaches as an allegory. The other is the Christmas party held at Lang’s mansion in Nha Trang. This paper recovers a critique of the US-led world order or a critical consciousness within the novel by reading the two episodes in relation to the South Korean politics of the time and the postwar international relations.

David F. Eisler, Writing Wars: Authorship and American War Fiction, WWI to Present

David F. Eisler, <i>Writing Wars: Authorship and American War Fiction, WWI to Present</i>

A queer problem: writing sapphic anarchism in Spanish Civil War fiction

ABSTRACT In this article, I offer an analysis of anarchist attitudes towards lesbianism in Spain in the 1930s and how these attitudes have informed my creative practice in writing a novel about the experiences of queer women in the Spanish Civil War. I propose that the anarchist lesbian is a paradox, being a figure that is simultaneously visible and invisible in the 1930s, and consider the importance of the butch stereotype in identifying lesbian women of the time, using Lucía Sánchez Saornil as a leading example of a masculine anarchist woman in the public eye and the individualist writings of Poch and Armand as examples of the generation of positive attitudes towards, and even encouraging, sapphic love. I locate my novel as a bridge between historiography and literature that seeks to rectify the lack of documentation about lesbian lives in this period. Finally, I offer a reading of Rosa Maria Arquimbau’s novel Quaranta anys perduts as an example of representation of coded lesbian anarchism in historical literature and explain how my work builds upon this genealogy of queer historical fiction about the Spanish Civil War.

The “Drama of Gender Difference,” or the Question of Masculinity and Patriarchy in the Vietnam War Fiction

The “Drama of Gender Difference,” or the Question of Masculinity and Patriarchy in the Vietnam War Fiction

‘Strange Growths’?: Jean Rhys’s Second World War Material

Jean Rhys’s stories ‘Temps Perdi’ (1967), ‘I Spy the Stranger’ (1966), ‘A Solid House,’ (1963), and ‘The Insect World’ (1973) do not figure in current scholarship on Second World War fiction. Versions of the first three were offered for publication in 1946. Rhys began writing ‘The Insect World’ in the mid-1940s. Rhys’s perspective in the fiction is that of an expatriate white Creole from Dominica, an island with formative Indigenous and French and British imperial histories. Focusing on ‘The Insect World’, ‘I Spy a Stranger’, and ‘Temps Perdi’, I analyse Rhys’s representations of temporalities of memory, ruin, loss of bearings, and hallucination and draw out the distinctive significance of the complex allusive and political reach of the fiction.

No safe place for war survivors: War memory, event exposure, and migrants' psychological trauma.

The present study explores the concept of reenactment of known and unknown war trauma that may be unfamiliar to the readers while also opening up new discourses of understanding and empathy through the lens of Cathy Caruth's trauma theory by focusing on the novel A Land of Permanent Goodbyes by Atia Abawi. War fiction, such as Abawi's novel, highlights the concept of psychological trauma as a double wound (known as "outsiders" and unknown as "insiders") through the textual analysis and characterization of characters by presenting their haunting pasts, present lives, and losses concerning traumatic events. The present study also recounts what the trauma of the unknown means to war-torn survivors by focusing on "trauma as double wounds" from three aspects: cause, effects, and recuperation. Finally, the study concludes with a new paradigm in which trauma is portrayed as a healer rather than a wound.

Phil Klay and the Art of War Fiction

Phil Klay and the Art of War Fiction

The Unlikely Heroine beyond Family Trauma: Four Women’s Fictions of the Second World War in Greece

My analysis of Victoria Hislop’s The Island (2005), Leah Fleming’s The Girl under the Olive Tree (2013), Sofka Zinovieff’s The House on Paradise Street (2012), and Brenda Reid’s The House of Dust and Dreams (2010) examines their treatment of the exotic setting of Greece in the specific historical context of World War II, while following the conventions of popular romance or popular women’s fiction. As a consequence of the conflict, the traditional family structure is compromised. This is particularly evident in the case of the female protagonists, heroines who refuse to fall within the traditional happyever-after ending and opt for a fulfilling career, a longfelt vocation, singlehood or simply unusual friendships of their choice. As a result, even in novels categorized as “romances”, the presence of a hero or lover is questioned and redefined. My analysis starts with Victoria Hislop’s The Island, a historical narrative of the leper colony at Spinalonga, around the time of the Second World War. For comparative purposes regarding the treatment of popular fiction elements, Brenda Reid’s The House of Dust and Dreams and Leah Fleming’s The Girl under the Olive Tree are discussed as being more generically romantic. Finally, Sofka Zinovieff’s The House on Paradise Street offers an example of a cohesive, compact combination of political confrontation and popular romance, while at the same time England appears as the counterpoint to the exoticism of Greece.

‘Unfailing Unity’: Jessie Louisa Moore Rickard, Great War Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento

This article offers a development of traditional approaches to Irish Great War literature which focus on issues of national identity towards a wider transnational field. It investigates two war narratives by Dublin-born Anglo-Irish writer Jessie Louisa Moore Rickard (1876–1963): her 1915 article for New Ireland ‘The Munsters at Rue du Bois’ and her 1918 home front novel The Fire of Green Boughs, both of which contain intertextual references to the Italian Risorgimento (1815–1871), or the unification of the Italian peninsula. By framing her works within the Italian context, Rickard establishes new paradigms of interpretation for both the representations of Ireland in First World War fiction and the Italian Risorgimento in English literature. In her works, Great War Ireland is no longer perceived as an essentially domestic conflict but rather as connected to other events across time and space, inscribing First World War Ireland within a more global context. Representations of the Risorgimento are also expanded in her work. So far, Irish scholarship has established strong links between the Italian struggle for independence and Irish nationalism. Rickard’s work, however, shows that the Risorgimento can also become a model for the Union between Ireland and England.

Shirley A. James Hanshaw, Re-Membering and Surviving African American Fiction of the Vietnam War

Shirley A. James Hanshaw, <i>Re-Membering and Surviving African American Fiction of the Vietnam War</i>

British and American Reception of The Red Laugh by Leonid Andreev

The article deals with the English-language reception of The Red Laugh , one of the most well-known of Leonid Andreev’s texts both in Russia and abroad. As the examples of this reception, a number of newspaper and magazine publications, memoirs, translators’ prefaces, and works of fiction are analyzed. There exist several waves of interest in Andreev’s story. They could be explained either by the appearance of new translations or by significant historic events of the time (the Russian Revolution, World Wars I and II). Andreev’s critics in Britain and America place his story in a variety of contexts - historical, social, cultural, and literary. Some literary parallels are quite expected and seem to come from Russian sources (parallels with Gorky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev), others are completely original and ‘indigenous’ to Britain and America (commentators of Andreev’s text see its resemblance with the horror and “weird” fiction of Poe, Hawthorne, Henry James, as well as with some works of war fiction, such as The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane). A wide spectrum of characteristics is given to the author of The Red Laugh ; he is perceived as a realist, expressionist, an author of horror and weird fiction, a symbolist, and a decadent.

The Unhomed Vietnam Veteran: “Queer Houses” in Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam Works

One of the most recurrent tropes in the US fiction emerging out of the experience of the war in Vietnam is the description of the feeling of estrangement of the soldiers. Up against a hostile and unreadable background, deprived of the tools to read the geographical and human landscapes, most returning veterans describe their feelings of alienation and constant fear. Once back in the US, most found that their feeling of unease and estrangement did not subside. Because of this, most of the fiction written by veteran soldiers directly or indirectly tackles the issues of home, homesickness, homelessness, and being unhomed. I argue that the centrality of these issues can be read as a commentary on the strategies of inclusion and exclusion which characterize the definition of the nation as home. One of the ways Vietnam War fiction has represented the issue of homelessness and estrangement from the homeland has been to resort to one of the most pervasive metaphors in US literature: that of the imperfect, crumbling haunted house. A great number of the houses featured in Vietnam War literature are imperfect and uncanny. The main aim of this article is the contextualization and analysis of the “queer” houses in Tim O’Brien’s fiction as a trope that allows the author to build a “poetics of uprootedness.”