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Sacrifice and Modern War Writing: Atavisms, Martyrdoms, and Economies of Loss

Name: Sacrifice and Modern War Writing: Atavisms, Martyrdoms, and Economies of Loss
Brand: Oxford University Press
SKU: 9780198912286
Price: 120.99 USD
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Contributors:

Alex Houen

Publisher:

Oxford University Press

Binding:

Hardcover

Book Category:

Literary Criticism

Book Subcategory:

Modern, Poetry

Book Topic:

20th Century

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The product is eligible for a complimentary return within 30 days from the date of purchase. Furthermore, individual items are shipped within 24 hours of receiving the order.

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Release Date:

2024-12-16

ISBN 13:

9780198912286

Weight:

1.5 lbs

Size:

9.32 x 6.46 x 0.95 inches

Pages:

336

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product description

Description

Sacrifice and Modern War Writing presents the most extensive study to date of twentieth- and twenty-first-century war writing. Examining works by over 110 authors, Alex Houen surveys how war writing explores sacrifice in relation to major modern and contemporary conflicts, from the First World War to the War on Terror. Various conceptions of sacrifice are examined, including Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and secular. The discussion ranges across literary portrayals of multiple sacrificial practices, including ancient rituals of child sacrifice, martyrdom, scapegoating, and suicide bombing. Houen builds an innovative interdisciplinary approach to how war, sacrifice, and their representations interrelate, and a wide range of Anglophone literature is discussed, including novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, manifestoes, elegies, ballads, and lyric poetry.

Whereas critics and theorists have tended to emphasize that war's reality exceeds any attempt to represent it, Houen contends that political, religious, and cultural frames of sacrifice have continued to play a significant part in shaping how war's reality is shaped and experienced. Those frames are inextricably tied to modes of representation, which include symbolism and mimesis. Sacrifice and Modern War Writing explores how sacrificial killing in war is itself riddled with symbolic transfigurations and mimetic exchanges, and it builds a fresh approach by arguing that the figurative and imaginative aspects of literary writing ironically become its very means of engaging closely with the reality of war's sacrifices. That approach also develops by using the literary analyses to critique and revise various prominent theories of sacrifice and war.

About the Author
Alex Houen, Professor of Modern Literature and Critical Theory, University of Cambridge

Alex Houen is Professor of Modern Literature and Critical Theory at Cambridge University, and Fellow of Pembroke College. He did a BA (Hons) and then a two-year research MPhil at the University of Sydney before obtaining a PhD at King's College, Cambridge. He taught Modern Literature and American Studies at the University of Sheffield until 2009.