War and Literature: Looking Back on 20th Century Armed Conflicts

This volume follows the radical change in the nature of armed conflicts and the way they are narrated and represented since the First World War, which rendered meaningless the very vocabulary of such terms as "battle," "front," "non-combatant," "open city," and "hero." The enemy became invisible. Submarines, tanks, mines, gas, long-range artillery, and airplanes made war different from all other conflicts that came before. These essays study representations of the Canudos Civil War in Brazil, the First and Second World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the colonial wars in Africa, and the war in Afghanistan.