War and Literary Studies

Description

War and Literary Studies poses two main questions: First, how has war shaped the field of literary studies? And second, when scholars today study the literature of war what are the key concepts in play? Seeking to complement the extant scholarship, this volume adopts a wider and more systematic approach as it directs our attention to the relation between warfare and literary studies as a field of knowledge. What are the key characteristics of the language of war? Of gender in war? Which questions are central to the way we engage with war and trauma or war and sensation? In which ways were prominent 20th century theories such as critical theory, French postwar theory, postcolonial theory shaped by war? How might emergent concepts such as 'revolution,' 'the anthropocene' or 'capitalism' inflect the study of war and literature?

Anders Engberg-Pedersen is Professor of Comparative Literature at The University of Southern Denmark. He is the author of two monographs, Empire of Chance. The Napoleonic Wars and the Disorder of Things (2015), and of Martial Aesthetics. How War Became an Art Form (2023). He edits the book series Prisms: Humanities and War. Neil Ramsey is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of New South Wales, Canberra. He is author of two monographs, The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture, 1780-1835 (2011) and Romanticism and the Biopolitics of Modern War Writing (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, 2022).