Veteran Poetics: British Literature in the Age of Mass Warfare, 1790-2015

Description

In this first full-length study of the war veteran in literature, Kate McLoughlin draws new critical attention to a figure central to national life. Offering fresh readings of canonical and non-canonical works, she shows how authors from William Wordsworth to J. K. Rowling have deployed veterans to explore questions that are simultaneously personal, political, and philosophical: What does a community owe to those who serve it? What can be recovered from the past? Do people stay the same over time? Are there right times of life at which to do certain things? Is there value in experience? How can wisdom be shared? Veteran Poetics features veterans who travel in time, cause havoc with their reappearances, solve murders, refuse to stop talking about the wars they have been in, and refuse to say a word about them. Through this last trait, they also prompt consideration of possible critical responses to silence.

Kate McLoughlin is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq (2011) (a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to War Writing (2009). She is also the co-founding director of WAR-Net. In 2016, she gave the Remembrance Day address in the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge; she has also given lectures at the National Army Museum and the National Memorial Arboretum.

'McLoughlin's framework in this ambitiously [wide-ranging] book combines literary theory and moral philosophy, weaving together the works of Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Immanuel Kant, [Gayatri] Chakravorty Spivak and others to consider what she terms our collective 'triplethink' which labels the veteran victim, hero and delinquent.' Helena Goodwyn, The Times Literary Supplement