War Fiction Research Articles

A Glimpse of Newspaper Fiction from <i>Union Press</i> (<i>Nanyang Zonghui Xinbao</i>): 1924 to 1928

What we can expect for fiction from the Union Press in this period 1924-1928 under study was my primary concern when I carried out my research of fiction from the Union Press from 1917 to 1923. Contrary to my expectation, new political developments that took place in Chinese Mainland coupled with economic decline in Malaya affected the production of Singapore Chinese fiction writing; language change in the Sinophonic world plus the pressures from local newspaper competitors aggravated the sharp situation. In referring to tales of ghosts and foxes, surprisingly in this period under study, Liaozhai and Pu Songling were vividly associated. The Liaozhai imitation carried on with some innovations in scope, especially the fresh appearance of the plot of the black fox and its fur. Other rare demons such as morning glory and banana demons are included. It appears that the intention in publishing these stories changed from asserting belief to drawing attention to these parapsychological phenomena. As they are mythological and religious in nature, it legitimatizes the author of this paper to discuss them separately. Since the linguistic styles of wenyan and baihua by that time were getting closer, the emergence of more baihua stories signalled that a new scenario was about to emerge although lagging slightly behind. The wenyan fiction is more traditional or historical, while baihua stories are more contemporary with modern writing techniques. With Lin Qinnan’s translations of Western fiction into wenyan, the gap between wenyan and baihua fictional writings is somewhat narrowed. So it is logical to consider both forms together for discussion. The majority of stories are about love and marriage, including cross-racial marriages (although these are limited in number). Tragedies often occurred as new women clashed with traditional ethical thinking. War fiction which condemned the cruelty of fighting and disclosed human nature is touching as well. The editors shared their efforts in organizing the stories so that enhancement of meanings could be achieved. This is reflected in the affiliated information published here and there with an intention to explain, e.g., martial skills stories reflected the need for self-defence in all walks of life in the then chaotic China and overseas Chinese communities. The Union Press somehow carried on its innovative spirit in this period. Its innovation extended to some advertisements, which are significant in terms of art and theme. The classification of genre and sub-genre was meticulously rigid all along; after the disruption of the North Expedition, most classifications were abolished and some of the congtan or small talk columns were opened up to include foreign matters, as a result blurring certain distinctions.

Dampening

When horrible war crimes have been committed by both sides, is a lasting peace more important than seeking justice against those who committed the crimes? In this work of war ethics short story fiction, two Inspectors, Seronian and a Bassweldan are put together to work on a criminal case. The case is of a Seronian and a Bassweldan who brutally murdered each other in a fit of rage. It seems they were both not using the “glanding” chemicals the entire population is required to use, to prevent old hatred from stirring up. The two inspectors’ investigation leads them to interview a “naturalist” group who believes the day will come when people will no longer have to inhibit their emotions by “glanding.” The story ends by the narrator finding out he had been set up to kill his fellow inspector in the name of vigilante justice for former war crimes. In fact, the narrator has more reasons to kill her than most as it was his family, that she had personally ordered murdered in the war.

The Great Gatsby: A Graphic Novel AdaptationNick: A NovelEl gran GatsbyStepping Out with Scott and Zelda: Touring the Fitzgeralds’ Montgomery

The Great Gatsby: A Graphic Novel AdaptationNick: A NovelEl gran GatsbyStepping Out with Scott and Zelda: Touring the Fitzgeralds’ Montgomery

William March’s Company K: history, memory, and metafiction

ABSTRACT Despite enjoying a sustained readership, William March’s Company K remains a surprisingly understudied examination of American soldiers in World War I. To date, just a mere handful of critical articles or book chapters have examined the novel in detail. March’s relentlessly anti-heroic themes, which now seem overly familiar (even clichéd) thanks to the popularity of works like Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (the bestselling war novel of all time) and Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film Paths of Glory, are perhaps part of the problem. But Company K is more than a war novel: on many levels, the book is about war writing. Indeed, March’s metafictional narrative plays with notions of representation and truth-telling in war literature in ways that anticipate Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. This essay offers a new appraisal of Company K by focusing on its metafictonal features, which include the deployment of a novel-within-a-novel structure, and its iconoclastic form. To underscore the originality of March’s approach, as well as his implied scorn for the critical standards of his day, the essay first summarizes attempts by leading war-literature critics in the 1920s and 1930s to nail-down the relationship between war fiction and truth. This section of the essay spotlights the controversial French expert on literary testimony, Jean Norton Cru, as well as the English military historian Cyril Falls and two distinguished American men of letters, Archibald MacLeish and Malcolm Cowley, both of whom had strong opinions about what constituted a truthful depiction of the Great War. The essay then demonstrates how March’s novel rejects most of the assumptions put forward by these critics, both through its reflexive recognition of its own fictionality and through its subversive form, a transmedia blend of devices drawn from early cinema, modernist painting, and historical writing.

War and Violence

This article reads David Treuer's 2016 novel Prudence as Indigenous war fiction. Prudence collapses the distinctions between battle- and home-front, between past and present, between right and wrong. This collapse allows for an exploration of violence and war and its role in establishing and maintaining nationhood. Examining the role of Indigenous bodies within this context extends the cultural and political implications of war fiction beyond a mere critique of war in its immidiacy; instead it elaborates on the continuities of colonial violence within a global context, questioning the singularity of war and detailing the realities of Indigenous life within northern America.

The American Short Story and Me

The American Short Story and Me

The Conflict of Recalling Traumatic Memories in Mariette Kalinowski's "The Train"

Traumatic experiences are characterized by its prelinguistic tendency. War fiction, however, refutes this statement when it reflects on the components of war so as to bear witness to its overwhelming nature as well as its ambiguous realities. Recalling the traumatic wounds of war, in this regard, is a testimonial avenue grounded on the desires of its narrators to be transformed from the confined scope of individuality into a more collective one. Written on the background of 2003 Iraq War, Mariette Kalinowski's "The Train" represents war's aftermath and the difficulty soldiers faced in adhering to ordinary life after being home. The conflict is a psychological one; it is shaped within the consciousness of a female soldier whose traumatized memory struggles against the ghost of past that haunts present. The study argues that Mariette Kalinowski's "The Train” follows the traumatized consciousness of an American veteran whose narrative line is marked by fragmentation, nonlinear plot, and the fluctuation between the past and the present. It also argues that the story itself is a testimonial narrative that aims at recordings individual suffering and thus placing it within a collective framework that motivates solidarity among wounded victims. The study relies on the psychological and literary aspects of trauma theory. It significantly draws on Cathy Caruth's Unclaimed Experiences, Ann Whitehead Trauma Fiction, Shoshana Felman's Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, and other theorists in the field of trauma theory.

Honouring Our War Heroes or Honouring War? Well-being in Contemporary Australian War Fiction for Children and Adolescents

War, like other stressful situations and experiences, entails a threat to one’s subjective well-being, and war fiction for children represents this threat in different ways: some narratives minimise it, and others do not. War fiction, then, provides material for a case study of war and its impact on representations of subjective well-being (SWB), and how this is communicated to children in the stories they read. This article examines representations of SWB in the context of Australia’s involvement in World War I in two recently published picture books: Midnight: The Story of a Light Horse (2014) by Mark Greenwood and Frane Lessac and One Minute’s Silence (2014) by David Metzenthen and Michael Camilleri. These picture books invite young readers into conflicting views of war and its impact on SWB. On the one hand, in Midnight schemas and scripts construct the belief that war is a glorious event that has a positive impact on SWB. On the other hand, in One Minute’s Silence schemas and scripts challenge the view that war is a viable means of solving national problems and enhancing SWB, and remembers its war heroes as tragic participants in a violent and senseless war.

Girls to the Rescue: Young Heroines in American Series Fiction of World War I by Emily Hamilton-Honey and Susan Ingalls Lewis

Reviewed by: Girls to the Rescue: Young Heroines in American Series Fiction of World War I by Emily Hamilton-Honey and Susan Ingalls Lewis Kristen Proehl Girls to the Rescue: Young Heroines in American Series Fiction of World War I. By Emily Hamilton-Honey and Susan Ingalls Lewis. Jefferson: McFarland & Company Inc., 2020. 252 pp. Paper $55. Emily Hamilton-Honey and Susan Ingalls Lewis's Girls to the Rescue: Young Heroines in American Series Fiction of World War I presents an intriguing examination of a comparatively underexamined body of literature: girls' series fiction of the First World War era. As the authors note in their introduction, although historians have long been interested in the role of gender in relation to the Great War, as well as "the impact of war on society and cultural issues," they have not thoroughly examined how girls contributed to the history of this era (1). This book persuasively argues and demonstrates that wartime changes in gender were reflected in girls' series literature (5). The study offers an important new contribution to girls' studies, among a variety of other disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields, as it reveals how early twentieth-century girls' series fiction may add to our understanding of the First World War era. Girls to the Rescue is organized into seven thematic chapters, along with an introduction, conclusion, and appendix. Chapter 1 explores girls' series fiction published both prior to and after American entry into the war, such as the Patty Fairfield series. Hamilton-Honey and Lewis argue that after the start of the war, girl protagonists tended to be "more independent, less inclined to listen to authority, and less domestic" (48). They show that the war seemed to "seep into girls' fiction gradually" and that series literature initially portrayed both the benefits and drawbacks of being a neutral nation (48). The second chapter examines one of the more conventional representations of wartime involvement: girls who supported the war effort from the position of the American [End Page 468] home front. Chapter 3 focuses on girls who were involved in nursing or relief work, such as those in Margaret Vandercook's Red Cross Girls series. Although nursing was a common and expected occupation for women at this time, the most popular texts from this era did not focus on nursing but rather used this occupation to set the stage for other, more exciting adventures (97). This chapter also includes some interesting discussion of Aunt Jane's Nieces series, written pseudonymously by Frank L. Baum (author of the well-known Oz series). The final chapters of Girls to the Rescue explore some of the ways in which series fiction radically reimagined girls' involvement in the Great War. As the authors note in chapter 4, the Progressive era ushered in new forms of transportation for women that were often closely linked to their sense of empowerment. This chapter examines the Grace Harlowe series and similar texts that portrayed girls who made use of new modes of transportation in service of the war effort. Chapter 5 examines girl heroines who captured spies and saboteurs and even gained national attention for their efforts. Chapter 6 features girls who rescued injured or endangered men and the final chapter focuses on "girls who fight" in a variety of ways, from the use of their own intelligence to firearms. Hamilton-Honey and Lewis have added conclusions to the end of every chapter that offer some of the study's most compelling analytical claims. Girls to the Rescue effectively uses interdisciplinary methods as it synthesizes analyses of literature, history, and visual culture. The authors center their analysis on literary texts and illustrations but approach this work using a historical framework. In so doing, they remain focused on the study's stated purpose: to use girls' series literature to "see how the war was sold to girls and to explore the parameters of girls' activism as represented in popular literature" (5). The authors enrich their historical research through the inclusion and visual analysis of illustrations and cover art from the girls' series texts. While Girls to the Rescue is an interdisciplinary work of scholarship, Hamilton-Honey and Lewis tend to focus on narrative analysis...

Books Received

Books Received Mark I. West ________ Batman: The Animated Series. By Joe Sutliff Sanders. Wayne State University Press, 2021. Part of Wayne State University Press’s TV Milestones Series, Batman: The Animated Series provides an overview of the Batman television cartoon that debuted in September 1992 on the Fox Children’s Network. Joe Sutliff Sanders discusses how this animated series grew out of the earlier versions of the Batman story, and he explains how this series reflects an animation style known as Dark Deco. Sanders also analyzes how this series portrays several of the key characters associated with the larger Batman story, such as the Penguin, the Riddler, and Harley Quinn. ________ Girls to the Rescue: Young Heroines in American Series Fiction of World War I. By Emily Hamilton-Honey and Susan Ingalls Lewis. McFarland, 2020. This volume provides a detailed analysis of girls’ series books that came out during World War I. The authors show the various ways in which the central characters in these stories contribute to the war effort by playing supportive roles on the home front and by participating directly in wartime activities. The authors argue that in some cases the adventurous heroines in these stories provided girl readers with feminist role models. ________ The Man in Black. By Paul Braddon. Foreword by Joseph L. Rainone. Dark Lantern Tales, 2020. Dark Lantern Tales specializes in republishing dime novels and other forms of pulp fiction from the late nineteenth century. This volume brings back into print Paul Braddon’s The Man in Black, which originally appeared as a serial in The Boys of New York in 1882. In his foreword, Joseph L. Rainone argues that The Man in Black can be seen as a precursor to Bob Kane’s Batman. This volume also includes Anthony P. Morris’s Dane Darrell, Baltimore Detective, or; “Piping” The Bats of the Basin, which was originally published in 1886 in the Old Cap Collier Library. This story also has points in common with Batman. [End Page 201] Copyright © 2021 Children’s Literature Association

"A Violence of Smell": The Smell of War in Israeli War Fiction

"A Violence of Smell": The Smell of War in Israeli War Fiction

Comparing Grief in French, British and Canadian Great War Fiction (1977–2014)

Comparing Grief in French, British and Canadian Great War Fiction (1977–2014)

Intimatopias and the queering of Australian war fiction

ABSTRACT This article examines how two works of fiction depict male same-sex desire in Australian military history. The protagonists in the novel Bodies of Men and the short story collection The Boys of Bullaroo do not identify as gay or bisexual, yet they develop intensely intimate friendships that become sexual. The texts come from different literary and popular genres, but they both represent what Elizabeth Woledge refers to as intimatopias: ‘a homosocial world in which the social closeness of the male characters engenders intimacy.’ Intimatopic fictions of war are queer texts that challenge binary and normative understandings of sexuality because the characters’ sexual identities are not defined by (homo)sexual acts. Bodies of Men and The Boys of Bullaroo are intentionally ambiguous about the protagonists’ sexualities, which are neither fixed nor fluid, but rather expressed as demisexual extensions of intimacy. The texts also challenge Australia’s digger and Anzac mythologies by presenting soldiers as sensitive, vulnerable and non-heterosexual. As such, intimatopic fictions of war reimagine Australian military history and offer new, queer conceptualizations of same-sex intimacy, mateship and desire.

The Hero and the Victim: Narratives of Criminality in Iraq War Fiction

Hero and the Victim: Narratives of Criminality in Iraq War Fiction analyzes several works of literary fiction, and one popular memoir, by American authors about the U.S. military experience in the Iraq War from 2003 to 2011. In contrast to the emphasis of most ancient war literature on the figure of the warrior-as-hero, and the growing modern emphasis on the figure of the soldier-as-victim, Iraq War fiction reflects the troubled emergence of a new narrative template for war literature: the story of the ordinary soldier as a wrongdoer or even criminal. Iraq War fiction is haunted by depictions of moral injury and expressions of unresolved guilt. The dissertation argues that the emphasis on criminality in Iraq War fiction can be partly explained by the rise of moral cosmopolitanism and its blurring of the traditional conceptual lines between war and crime.

The Great War and Anglo-American Literature: Before and After

This article presents a survey of the important Anglo-American fiction of the First World War (Hemingway, etc.), with special attention given to lesser known works, including foreign authors who influenced this fiction during and after the conflict. Finally, more recent novels about the war will be approached regarding their concern with the recollection of a time one century past.

War after War: State Allegory in an Age of Security

What is the nature and cultural function of literature in a “War on Terror”? Some commentators have struggled to answer this question because they expect such a literature to emphasize combat or they fail to appreciate the allegorical nature of the most incisive fictions of the War on Terror. “State allegory” played an essential role in underwriting the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.” In the years after September 11, 2001, it also played an increasingly important role in the critique of US policy. Before 9/11, a popular form of melodrama laid the ground for the rise of the US Homeland Security State by dramatizing the purported efficacy of emergency measures and allegorizing citizens as wards of a massive and clandestine security state. After the intelligence failures of the US War in Iraq, however, this type of melodrama expressed growing skepticism about US policy by allegorizing a growing American public discomfort with the work of the security state. Literary fiction also developed sophisticated critiques of American policy through fabulous, psychologically rich, and sometimes surreal allegories. This paper surveys this history of state allegory before turning to an extended example: Colson Whitehead’s 2011 novel Zone One. Whitehead’s novel powerfully illustrates the role of speculative allegory in critiquing the new US paradigm for state security.

戦争文学教材で考える戦争のリアリティ:――『大人になれなかった弟たちに…』の描くB29を入り口に――

戦争文学教材で考える戦争のリアリティ:――『大人になれなかった弟たちに…』の描くB29を入り口に――

Haunted Mountains, Supershelters, and the Afterlives of Cold War Infrastructure

A dominant architectural form in the global North since the end of the Second World War, the deep-level supershelters, command centers, and hidden fortifications built within mountains mobilize an ambivalent imaginary called here the ‘bunker fantasy’. This cluster of images is simultaneously technologized and sacred. During the Cold War, imagined mountain bunkers in nuclear war fiction are shown to be haunted by what they exclude. After the Cold War, repurposed mountain-side bunkers and installations invoke new forms of the sacred as part of their reckoning with the past. Because the nuclear condition works against a progressive sense of history, it permits previously discredited or marginalized beliefs to begin recirculating in a new context. Through sacred mountains like Mount Shasta, the apocalyptic prospect of nuclear war becomes just one element within a cosmic and cyclical history that imagines alternate possibilities for the twentieth century.

The war novel and human rights

The war novel, a distinct genre of fiction, has typically been read as a type of humanitarian narrative. This article explains how the war novel participates in humanitarian discourse but also has another role to play that addresses human rights more specifically. In the effort to identify accountability, war novels explore complex historical events and offer us important insights on the challenges of historical narration more broadly. Furthermore, in offering explanations for “who?” and “why?,” war novels model how we can approach the complex history of conflict for human rights. To illustrate how accountability is a central theme of war fiction, the essay turns to examples of novels about the Vietnam War.

Editor's Note

Editor's Note