Download or read book Men At War What Fiction Tells us About Conflict From The Iliad to Catch 22 written by Christopher Coker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since Achilles first stormed into our imagination, literature has introduced its readers to truly unforgettable martial characters. In Men at War, Christopher Coker discusses some of the most famous of these fictional creations and their impact on our understanding of war and masculinity. Grouped into five archetypes-warriors, heroes, villains, survivors and victims-these characters range across 3000 years of history, through epic poems, the modern novel and one of the twentieth century's most famous film scripts. Great authors like Homer and Tolstoy show us aspects of reality invisible except through a literary lens, while fictional characters such as Achilles and Falstaff, Robert Jordan and Jack Aubrey, are not just larger than life; they are life's largeness-and this is why we seek them out. Although the Greeks knew that the lovers, wives and mothers of soldiers are the chief victims of battle, for the combatants, war is a masculine pursuit. Each of Coker's chapters explores what fiction tells us about war's appeal to young men and the way it makes- and breaks-them. The existential appeal of war too is perhaps best conveyed in fictional accounts, and these too are scrutinized by the author.
Download or read book Men At War written by Christopher Coker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since Achilles first stormed into our imagination, literature has introduced its readers to truly unforgettable martial characters. In Men at War, Christopher Coker discusses some of the most famous of these fictional creations and their impact on our understanding of war and masculinity. Grouped into five archetypes-warriors, heroes, villains, survivors and victims-these characters range across 3000 years of history, through epic poems, the modern novel and one of the twentieth century's most famous film scripts. Great authors like Homer and Tolstoy show us aspects of reality invisible except through a literary lens, while fictional characters such as Achilles and Falstaff, Robert Jordan and Jack Aubrey, are not just larger than life; they are life's largeness-and this is why we seek them out. Although the Greeks knew that the lovers, wives and mothers of soldiers are the chief victims of battle, for the combatants, war is a masculine pursuit. Each of Coker's chapters explores what fiction tells us about war's appeal to young men and the way it makes- and breaks-them. The existential appeal of war too is perhaps best conveyed in fictional accounts, and these too are scrutinized by the author.
Download or read book Men At War written by Christopher Coker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-06 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since Achilles first stormed into our imagination, literature has introduced its readers to truly unforgettable martial characters. In Men at War, Christopher Coker discusses some of the most famous of these fictional creations and their impact on our understanding of war and masculinity. Grouped into five archetypes-warriors, heroes, villains, survivors and victims-these characters range across 3000 years of history, through epic poems, the modern novel and one of the twentieth century's most famous film scripts. Great authors like Homer and Tolstoy show us aspects of reality invisible except through a literary lens, while fictional characters such as Achilles and Falstaff, Robert Jordan and Jack Aubrey, are not just larger than life; they are life's largeness-and this is why we seek them out. Although the Greeks knew that the lovers, wives and mothers of soldiers are the chief victims of battle, for the combatants, war is a masculine pursuit. Each of Coker's chapters explores what fiction tells us about war's appeal to young men and the way it makes- and breaks-them. The existential appeal of war too is perhaps best conveyed in fictional accounts, and these too are scrutinized by the author.
Download or read book Going Scapegoat written by David A. Buchanan and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2016-09-27 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 9/11, war literature has become a key element in American popular culture, spurring critical debate about depictions of combat--Who can write war literature? When can they do it? This book presents a new way to closely read war narratives, questioning the idea of "combat gnosticism"--the belief that the experience of war is impossible to communicate to those who have not seen it--that has dominated the discussion. Adapting Kenneth Burke's scapegoat mechanism to the criticism of literature and film, the author examines three novels from 2012--Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, David Abrams's FOBBIT and Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds--that represent the U.S. military responses to 9/11.
Download or read book Gender and Drone Warfare written by Lindsay Clark and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-20 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates how drone warfare is deeply gendered and how this can be explored through the methodological framework of ‘Haunting’. Utilising original interview data from British Reaper drone crews, the book analyses the way killing by drones complicates traditional understandings of masculinity and femininity in warfare. As their role does not include physical risk, drone crews have been critiqued for failing to meet the masculine requirements necessary to be considered ‘warriors’ and have been derided for feminising war. However, this book argues that drone warfare, and the experiences of the crews, exceeds the traditional masculine/feminine binary and suggests a new approach to explore this issue. The framework of Haunting presented here draws on the insights of Jacques Derrida, Avery Gordon, and others to highlight four key themes – complex personhood, in/(hyper)visibility, disturbed temporality and power – as frames through which the intersection of gender and drone warfare can be examined. This book argues that Haunting provides a framework for both revealing and destabilising gendered binaries of use for feminist security studies and International Relations scholars, as well as shedding light on British drone warfare. This book will be of interest to students of gender studies, sociology, war studies, and critical security studies.
Download or read book Understanding War written by Christian P. Potholm and published by UPA. This book was released on 2016-08-03 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third book in Professor Christian Potholm’s war trilogy (which includes Winning at War and War Wisdom), Understanding War provides a most workable bibliography dealing with the vast literature on war and warfare. As such, it provides insights into over 3000 works on this overwhelmingly extensive material. Understanding War is thus the most comprehensive annotated bibliography available today. Moreover, by dividing war material into eighteen overarching themes of analysis and fifty seminal topics, and focusing on these, Understanding War enables the reader to access and understand the broadest possible array of materials across both time and space, beginning with the earliest forms of warfare and concluding with the contemporary situation. Stimulating and thought-provoking, this volume is essential for an understanding of the breadth and depth of the vast scholarship dealing with war and warfare through human history and across cultures.
Download or read book Bringing War to Book written by Rachel Woodward and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how military memoirs come to be written and published. Looking at the journeys through which soldiers and other military personnel become writers, the authors draw on over 250 military memoirs published since 1980 about service with the British armed forces, and on interviews with published military memoirists who talk in detail about the writing and production of their books. A range of themes are explored including: the nature of the military memoir; motivations for writing; authors’ reflections on their readerships; inclusions and exclusions within the text; the memories and materials that authors draw on; the collaborations that make the production and publication of military memoirs possible; and the issues around the design of military memoirs' distinctive covers. Written by two leading commentators on the sociology of the military, Bringing War to Book offers a new and original argument about the representations of war and the military experience as a process of social production. The book will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including sociology, history, and cultural studies.
Download or read book Friendly Fire in the Literature of War written by Earl R. Anderson and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2017-05-08 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term "friendly fire" was coined in the 1970s but the theme appears in literature from ancient times to the present. It begins the narrative in Aeschylus's Persians and Larry Heinemann's Paco's Story. It marks the turning point in Homer's Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid, the Chanson de Roland, Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage and Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato. It is the subject of transformative disclosure in Jaan Kross's Czar's Madman, Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July, O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods and A.B. Yehoshua's Friendly Fire. In some stories, events propel the characters into a friendly-fire catastrophe, as in Thomas Taylor's A Piece of this Country and Oliver Stone's 1986 film Platoon. This study examines friendly fire in a broad range of literary contexts.
Download or read book The Great War and Scottish Nurses Diaries written by Costel Coroban and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-03-21 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses the representations of the different instances of war in the letters and diaries of the nurses and doctors of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals who worked in Romania during the Great War. These nurses detailed their experiences into journals through literary diegesis that included minute observations on their work, surroundings, and different developments of the front, as well as their own interpretations of, and impressions on, their work and the war’s destructive character. Generally, the approaches to the Great War by women who witnessed and lived it have either been gender-oriented or, simply, seen as petit histoire(s). This research represents a complementary addition to the existing literature, through its focus on the experience of the women on the fighting front, looking at it from the double perspective of autobiographical writing and war testimony.
Download or read book Transforming Warriors written by Peter Haldén and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers an interdisciplinary study of how different cultures have sought to transform individuals into warriors. War changes people, however a less explored question is how different societies want people to change as they are turned into warriors. When societies go to war they recognize that a boundary is being crossed. The participants are expected to do things that are otherwise prohibited, or at least governed by different rules. This edited volume analyses how different cultures have conceptualized the transformations of an individual passing from a peacetime to a wartime existence to become an active warrior. Despite their differences, all societies grapple with the same question: how much of the individual’s peace-self should be and can be retained in the state of war? The book explores cases such as the Nordic berserkers, the Japanese samurai, and European knights, as well as modern soldiers in Germany, Liberia, and Sweden. It shows that archaic and modern societies are more similar than we usually think: both kinds of societies use myths, symbols, and rituals to create warriors. Thus, this volume seeks to redefine theories of modernization and secularization. It shows that military organizations need to take myths, symbols, and rituals seriously in order to create effective units. This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, war studies, sociology, religion, and international relations in general.
Download or read book Flashman written by George MacDonald Fraser and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1984-08-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "If ever there was a time when I felt that 'watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet' stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman."–P.G. Wodehouse The first novel in the Flashman series Fraser revives Flashman, a caddish bully from Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes, and relates Flashman’s adventures after he is expelled in drunken disgrace from Rugby school in the late 1830s. Flashy enlists in the Eleventh Light Dragoons and is promptly sent to India and Afghanistan, where despite his consistently cowardly behavior he always manages to come out on top. Flashman is an incorrigible anti-hero for the ages. This humorous adventure book will appeal to fans of historical fiction, military fiction, and British history as well as to fans of Clive Cussler, James Bond, and The Three Musketeers.
Download or read book Matterhorn written by Karl Marlantes and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones’s The Thin Red Line. It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever. Written by a highly decorated Marine veteran over the course of thirty years, Matterhorn is a spellbinding and unforgettable novel that brings to life an entire world—both its horrors and its thrills—and seems destined to become a classic of combat literature.
Download or read book Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute written by United States Naval Institute and published by . This book was released on 2014-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Hunters written by James Salter and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Captain Cleve Connell has already made a name for himself among pilots when he arrives in Korea during the war there to fly the newly operational F–86 fighters against the Soviet MIGs. His goal, like that of every fighter pilot, is to chalk up enough kills to become an ace. But things do not turn out as expected. Mission after mission proves fruitless, and Connell finds his ability and his stomach for combat questioned by his fellow airmen: the brash wing commander, Imil; Captain Robey, an ace whose record is suspect; and finally, Lieutenant Pell, a cocky young pilot with an uncanny amount of skill and luck. Disappointment and fear gradually erode Connell's faith in himself, and his dream of making ace seems to slip out of reach. Then suddenly, one dramatic mission above the Yalu River reveals the depth of his courage and honor. Originally published in 1956, The Hunters was James Salter's first novel. Based on his own experiences as a fighter pilot in the Korean War, it is a classic of wartime fiction. Now revised by the author and back in print on the sixty–fifth anniversary of the Air Force, the story of Cleve Connell's war flies straight into the heart of men's rivalries and fears.
Download or read book The Silence of the Girls written by Pat Barker and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Washington Post Notable Book One of the Best Books of the Year: NPR, The Economist, Financial Times Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award Finalist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction Here is the story of the Iliad as we’ve never heard it before: in the words of Briseis, Trojan queen and captive of Achilles. Given only a few words in Homer’s epic and largely erased by history, she is nonetheless a pivotal figure in the Trojan War. In these pages she comes fully to life: wry, watchful, forging connections among her fellow female prisoners even as she is caught between Greece’s two most powerful warriors. Her story pulls back the veil on the thousands of women who lived behind the scenes of the Greek army camp—concubines, nurses, prostitutes, the women who lay out the dead—as gods and mortals spar, and as a legendary war hurtles toward its inevitable conclusion. Brilliantly written, filled with moments of terror and beauty, The Silence of the Girls gives voice to an extraordinary woman—and makes an ancient story new again.
Download or read book The Improbable War written by Christopher Coker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Improbable War explains why conflict between the USA and China cannot be ruled out. In 1914 war between the Great Powers was considered unlikely, yet it happened. We learn only from history, and popular though the First World War analogy is, the lessons we draw from its outbreak are usually mistaken. Among these errors is the tendency to over-estimate human rationality. All major conflicts of the past 300 years have been about the norms and rules of the international system. In China and the US the world confronts two 'exceptional' powers whose values differ markedly, with China bidding to challenge the current order. The 'Thucydidean Trap' - when a conservative status quo power confronts a rising new one - may also play its part in precipitating hostilities. To avoid stumbling into an avoidable war both Beijing and Washington need a coherent strategy, which neither of them has. History also reveals that war evolves continually. The next global conflict is likely to be played out in cyberspace and outer space and like all previous wars it will have devastating consequences. Such a war between the United States and China may seem improbable, but it is all too possible, which is why we need to discuss it now.
Download or read book The Iliad written by Homer and published by . This book was released on 1876 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
