Conflict, nationhood and corporeality in modern literature: bodies-at-war

War is about killing people. Official war cultures go to great lengths to deny this fact and to normalize conflict yet the literary response to war often focuses on its physical conditions and their impact on literal and figurative bodies (the body politic, the national canon, national territory). This collection of essays is a critical response to the discrepancy of corporeal representations in our modern war culture. The contributors offer a reassessment of modern literature as an often uncomfortable and controversial articulation of dissent about aspects of wartime culture and politics, in which images and metaphors of the body are employed to construct arguments about nationhood. Spanning literature from World War I to the present day, this collection includes essays on pacifist theatre, war and landscape, forgotten bodies in Irish cultural memory of World War I, corpses in World War II crime fiction, torture and Holocaust memory, voice in contemporary war poetry, uniforms and masculinity, perpetrator fantasies, and dismemberment in Cold War literature.