Like other literary genres in fifth-century Athens, such as tragedy and oratory, ancient historiography responded to the continuous wars of the Greek city-states with an intense literary effort, producing the first prose descriptions of warfare in the western hemisphere. This chapter examines the representation of warfare in fifth-century Athenian literature against an historical background, taking account of Homeric epic as well as of political and normative contexts, in order to clarify textual priorities and narrative strategies. It begins by analyzing representations of extreme conditions: death in battle, often cast as the ultimate test of manhood, and military defeat. It then backs up to look at representations of the course of warfare, analyzing the role of victorious leadership, intelligence, and courage together with the accompanying descriptions of bodily suffering and human error. Finally, the chapter examines representations of the human causes of war: greed, retaliation for insult, and the desire for power, profit, and rule over others. As a short coda, it reflects on the popularity of war as a literary theme, noting the emergence of war fiction with Xenophon’s Cyropaedia.

Taking the First World War as an originary moment of global conflict, the chapter examines how a postcolonial approach opens up war studies in terms of perspective and methodology while asking, at the same time, how a focus on warfare puts pressure on the abstractions of postcolonial theory. What do terms such as ‘war archive’ and the ‘literary’ mean in a context where the majority of the world’s combatants and non-combatants were, till recently, largely non-literate? How does the experience of colonialism trouble the very distinction between ‘war’ and ‘peace’ in global histories and what is the relationship between anti-colonial resistance and postcolonial critique? Is diversity the first step towards decolonisation? The chapter engages with these issues through a focus on the colonial dimensions of the First World War. Combining a reconceptualization of the ‘archive’ with readings of figures such as Rabindranath Tagore, Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, Rudyard Kipling, Mulk Raj Anand and David Diop, it argues that a postcolonial approach goes far beyond challenging the colour of memory or Eurocentric assumptions into deconstructing the ideology of war itself.

The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School was a child of total war. In the aftermath of World War I, its founding members sought to understand the new phenomenon of total mobilization, the integration of all aspects of state, society, and economy into a war effort that effectively erased traditional distinctions between war and peace. Their conception of Marxism, and the development of their critiques of mass culture and fascism, were shaped by the outcome of this effort at understanding total warfare. This chapter reconstructs the trajectory of the critical responses to total warfare in the Weimar period by the founders of Critical Theory and their counterparts on the German Right. It reviews core texts by Horkheimer and Adorno to see how their critique of mass culture in the United States and fascist mobilization in Germany are informed by their encounter with total mobilization. In its concluding section, the chapter argues that the power of this critical project came at a steep price: convinced of totalizing nature of modern warfare, critical theorists had few resources to respond to new, lower-intensity armed conflicts characteristic of decolonization struggles.

The Romantic theory of war described in this chapter is the product of a group of highly educated Prussian officers trying to grasp the new conditions of politics and warfare that emerged in the wake of the French Revolution. They had studied the philosophy of enlightenment, the history of warfare, and the mathematics of probability, they had read the works of the Classical and Romantic poets of their time, and they had fought in the Revolutionary and the Napoleonic wars. In order to define the nature of war, one of the most eminent of these thinkers, Carl von Clausewitz, relied on Immanuel Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Describing the reality of war, he also relied on three new sciences that had played a role in Kant’s philosophy: the science of static and mechanics, the science of electro-magnetism, and the science of population statistics. The chapter argues that while Clausewitz was not a precursor of Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication, one of the most consequential moments of the digital revolution, he does, however, remain relevant to this day as one of the first theorists of irregular warfare.

War and language have a symbiotic relationship. On the one hand, wars are carried on and remembered through a proliferation of linguistic discourse. On the other, language is often a site of violent action and the battlefield of fierce struggles for power. This chapter explores the symbiosis between war and language at two different levels. First, it delves into the language of war as explored by modern and contemporary writers and thinkers. Second, it analyzes the language on war by suggesting the most common family resemblances of war writing (e.g., the preponderance of the adynaton, the absurd, the sublime, metaliterature and self-referentiality, the embedding of reflections on war, the presence of an authorial ethical stand, the importance of the senses, factuality), as well as by studying three of its main parameters. At the end, the chapter argues that the writing on war openly addresses epistemological, ontological, and ethical issues that most, if not all, literary writing has to face sooner or later, and it concludes that since it self-consciously brings out essential aspects of any literary artifact, war writing constitutes an apotheosis of literature itself.

This chapter deals with the concept of the civilian as it manifests in the study of war writing from the early twentieth century onwards. The category of the civilian has particular significance for the development of war literature studies, as both the figure which provides a foil to the hegemonic combatant, and as the repressed or forgotten ‘other’ in constructions of revisionist, non-patriarchal histories and canons. That this is not initially obvious has much to do with the persistent privileging of the combatant subject as a source of, and relay of, testimony about the reality of war. War literature studies, in focusing on the twentieth-century combatant (with the Great War infantryman the default paradigm case), has reproduced explicit and tacit constructions of the civilian. Explicitly, in the rhetoric of protest, civilians as referents of war literature are outsiders, ignorant of war; implicitly, civilians are the audience of war writing.

This chapter explores literary and cinematic works that capture the emergence of technogenic life-forms in war zones through the artificial vision of the drone: that terror-inducing aerial surveillance apparatus and killing machine that is planetary in its reach and catastrophic in its impact. By technogenic life-forms, I mean machinic abstractions of the organic human form that are available for manipulation, expulsion, and annihilation. These life-forms are the product of a scalar transformation of ordinary human vision through the composite digital infrastructure of the drone. The aesthetic repertoire of the chapter ranges from novels such as Richard Clark’s The Sting of the Drone (2014) and Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019), films such as Madiha Tahir’s Wounds of Waziristan (2013) and Atef Abu Saif’s war diary The Drone Eats with Me (2016).

Drawing on literary works from the Revolutionary Wars (Schiller’s Die Jungfrau von Orleans and Kleist’s Hermannsschlacht), the First World War (Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues and Ernst Jünger’s In Stahlgewittern), the Second World War (Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster) and the recent Iraq War (Handke’s Yugoslavia essays and Jelinek’s Bambiland), this chapter argues that the perception of specific historical wars is marked by distinct configurations of time and historicity. Literary representations of the Revolutionary Wars tend to conceive of war within a gradual unfolding of national destiny. Depictions of the First World War chafe against linear concepts of time and against concepts of temporal homogeneity. Representations of the Second World War radically deconstruct concepts of linearity and teleology. Here, time is a web in which the past impinges on the present and the present impacts the future. Both Handke’s and Jelinek’s texts, finally, are characterized by a detachment or even alienation from time and space occasioned by the mediatization of warfare on television and the web.

As C. H. Wang observed in 1975, early Chinese representations of war generally perform an “ellipsis of battle” – readily narrating the causes of a war and its ultimate results, but avoiding detailed accounts of the fighting. The reason for this omission lies in the Mencian doctrine that the true ruler of the world must be “one who does not love killing.” Whether or not actual rulers loved killing, they had to be represented as if they went to war only against their will. Twentieth-century conditions changed the meaning of war in China as elsewhere. Warfare was now done by armies massively mobilized among the population; noncombatants found themselves taking an active part or being massacred; phases of civil war pitted Chinese against Chinese. Poets faced a dilemma: to prioritize the obligations of Chinese citizens in a life-or-death struggle for the survival of the nation, or persist in an individualist stance that the struggle put at risk? Examples of modern poets’ thinking through real and imagined actions of warfare show how twentieth-century Chinese literature demolished longstanding taboos and claimed new thematic territories.

Literary and filmic renditions of war are often organized around expressions of heightened sensation and aptitude. Sensation functions as a kind of other or alternative to trauma, a way of figuring the extreme experience of war in terms that, like trauma, separate the soldier from the ordinary citizen. At the same time, civilian texts by writers as diverse as H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Kurt Vonnegut have explored the way sensation and other forms of exaltation, including the sublime, might also characterize the civilian experience of war. This chapter explores the close connection between the motifs of sublimity and sensation in war with other related principles that have characterized twentieth-century literature, considering both combatant and civilian texts. The chapter argues that the moral culture of the twentieth century requires that we acknowledge the shared experience of war across combat and non-combatant lines, and second, that the slippage between these two, and the rendering of exaltation as a value that can be abstracted from war, carries its own moral risks.

The notion of an ‘aesthetics of war’ immediately raises questions about how artistic cynosures concerned with order, beauty, and the discernment of taste can be applied to the ignoble horrors of modern warfare. For that very reason, modern literature has striven to find aesthetic alternatives to the mandates of direct representation. In the first half of the twentieth century, this striving is starkly visible, as an aesthetics of realism (practiced by the War Poets) vies with an aesthetics of indirection (evident in the modernist works of Yeats and Woolf). In the second half of the century, in the shadow of nuclear terror, there is a turn to the satirical and the scabrous – most notably, in the trio of American World War II novels that defined the field for a generation or more: Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Gravity’s Rainbow. Subsequently, wars in Vietnam and Bosnia prompt writers to use field reportage in resourceful, post-realist ways, sometimes echoing modernist poetics. Examining the aesthetic changes noted above, this chapter shows how the formal conundrum of representation has been illuminated, engaged with and, ultimately, used to productive ends in modern war literature.

The connection between literature about war and humanitarianism is complex. The war novel tends towards a human rights ethos that demands accountability for war atrocities. These novels express antiwar views, whereas humanitarianism’s genealogy in the laws of war reflects an acceptance of war as inevitable. Humanitarian discourse deploys a narrative paradigm that sees human suffering in war through trauma. In fiction, it frequently foregrounds the role of doctors and nurses as witnesses to war’s suffering. The resulting attention to victims’ disempowerment effectively reinforces the global inequality of lives and is problematic. This chapter argues that postcolonial literature of war offers a counterwitnessing that exceeds the affective accounts of trauma narratives and foregrounds the breach in humanitarianism’s imperative to save lives. Postcolonial literature’s critical engagement with war centers on the achievement of radical equality and visibility of all lives.

Few concepts have become as closely associated with war literature as trauma. War literature revolves around the isolated voices of soldiers and their deeply unsettled afterlives – it takes as its subject matter the individual experience and consequences of war. This chapter argues, however, that the mass may be more than incidental in our understanding of how war literature embodies trauma. An overwhelming experience, trauma is deeply entangled with mass warfare, industrialisation, and the homogenous, empty time of global capitalism. The question of mass or scale is central to how we have come to conceptualise trauma more generally, whether in relation to genocide, pandemics, ecological limits to growth, or the political consequences of global finance or even mass trauma itself. Understood as a structural condition of anxiety, trauma is now even encroaching upon the future as a pre-traumatic foreboding of militarism and the threat of global catastrophe. Examining these links between war and the mass, this chapter suggests a reconceptualization of trauma that associates its characteristic temporal dislocations with questions of scale, uniformity, and incomprehension.

In the literary field, the intertwinement of war and religion is nowhere as prominent as in epic poetry. Within the European horizon Christian-Muslim confrontations are prominent, not only in chansons de geste and in Renaissance epics, the standard highlights of literary history, but right back to early Muslim-Byzantine confrontations and Carolingian warfare in the Iberian Peninsula, as well as through the seventeenth and even the eighteenth centuries. This chapter explores ways in which epic poetry participates in spatial delineations and cultural articulations of Europe as a Christian realm from the Iberian Peninsula through the Mediterranean to Central and Eastern Europe. It also considers ways in which a variety of nuances may be detected beyond the overall religious framing of conflicts: empathy vis-à-vis the enemy may be articulated, and problematic behavior of national-imperial soldiery may be exposed; admiration for aspects of Muslim culture – and even for major enemies – may be articulated; furthermore commercial as well as other secular concerns (like piracy) may motivate warfare that is framed as religious.