War novel
Encyclopedia
A war novel is a novel
in which the primary action takes place in a field of armed combat
, or in a domestic setting (or home front
) where the characters
are preoccupied with the preparations for, or recovery from, war
. It is sometimes referred to as military fiction.
of the classical
and medieval periods, especially Homer
's The Iliad, Virgil
's The Aeneid, the Old English saga Beowulf
, and different versions of the legends of King Arthur
. All of these epics were concerned with preserving the history
or mythology
of conflicts between different societies, while providing an accessible narrative that could reinforce the collective memory
of a people. Other important influences on the war novel included the tragedies of such dramatists as Euripides
, Seneca the Younger
, Christopher Marlowe
, and Shakespeare. Shakespeare's Henry V
provided a model for how the history, tactics
, and ethics
of war could be combined in an essentially fictional framework. Romance
s and satire
s in Early Modern Europe
--Edmund Spenser
's The Faerie Queene
and Miguel de Cervantes
's Don Quixote, to name two of many—also contained elements of military heroism and folly that influenced the later development of war novels. In terms of imagery and symbol
ism, many modern war novels (especially those espousing an anti-war
viewpoint) take their cue from Dante
's depiction of Hell
in The Inferno, John Milton
's account of the war in Heaven
in Paradise Lost
, and the Apocalypse
as depicted in the Book of Revelation
. Notable non-western example of war novel include Luo Guanzhong
's Romance of the Three Kingdoms
.
As the prose
fiction novel rose to prominence in the seventeenth century, the war novel began to develop its modern form, although most novels featuring war were picaresque satires in which the soldier
was rakish rather than realistic figure. An example of one such work is Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen
's Simplicissimus
, a semi-autobiographical account of the Thirty Years' War
.
's The Charterhouse of Parma
, featuring the Battle of Waterloo
, Leo Tolstoy
's War and Peace
, about the Napoleonic Wars
in Russia
, and Stephen Crane
's The Red Badge of Courage
, about the American Civil War
established the conventions of the modern war novel as it has come down to us today. All of these works feature realistic depictions of major battle
s, visceral scenes of wartime horrors and atrocities, and significant insights into the nature of heroism, cowardice
, and morality
in war
.
produced an unprecedented number of war novels, by writers from countries on all sides of the conflict. One of the first and most influential of these was the 1916 novel Le Feu (or Under Fire
) by the French
novelist and soldier Henri Barbusse
. Barbusse's novel, with its open criticism of nationalist dogma and military incompetence, initiated the anti-war movement in literature that flourished after the war.
Of equal significance is the autobiographical work of Ernst Jünger
, Storm of Steel
. Distinctly separate from novels like Barbusse's and later Erich Maria Remarque
's Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front
), Jünger instead writes of the war as a valiant hero who embraced combat and brotherhood in spite of the horror. The work not only provides for an under-represented perspective of the War, but it also gives insight into the German sentiment that they were never actually defeated in the First World War.
The post-1918 period produced a vast range of war novels, including such "home front" novels as Rebecca West
's The Return of the Soldier
, about a shell shock
ed soldier's difficult re-integration into British society; Romain Rolland
's Clérambault, about a grieving father's enraged protest against French militarism
; and John Dos Passos
's Three Soldiers
, one of a relatively small number of American novels about the First World War.
Also in the post–World War I period, the theme of war began to inhabit an increasing number of modernist novels, many of which were not "war novels" in the conventional sense, but which featured characters whose psychological trauma
and alienation
from society stemmed directly from wartime experiences. One example this type of novel is Virginia Woolf
's Mrs. Dalloway, in which a key subplot
concerns the tortuous descent of a young veteran, Septimus Warren Smith, toward insanity and suicide
.
The late 1920s saw the rise of the so-called "war book boom," during which many men who had fought during the war were finally ready to write openly and critically about their war experiences. In 1924, Laurence Stallings
wrote, one of the first autobiographical war novels, Plumes. In 1929, Erich Maria Remarque
's Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front
) was a massive, worldwide bestseller
, not least for its brutally realistic account of the horrors of trench warfare
from the perspective of a German
infantryman. Less well known but equally shocking in its account of the horrors of trench warfare is Stratis Myrivilis
' Greek novel Life in the Tomb, which was first published in serialised form in the weekly newspaper Kambana (April 1923 - January 1924), and then in revised and much expanded form in 1930. Also successful were Ernest Hemingway
's A Farewell to Arms
, William March
's Company K
, Richard Aldington
's Death of a Hero
, Arnold Zweig
's Der Streit un den Sergeanten Grischa (The Case of Sergeant Grischa
), and Charles Yale Harrison
's Generals Die in Bed
.
Novels about World War I continued to trickle into print throughout the 1930s. One particular development during this decade was the rise in popularity of historical novel
s about earlier wars. Margaret Mitchell
's Gone with the Wind
, which recalls the American Civil War, is an example of works of this type. The turn of the 20th and 21st centuries saw yet another resurgence of interest in novels of the First World War. Pat Barker
's trilogy: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and Ghost Road certainly illustrated the ongoing fascination with the "War to end Wars" as did more recent works such as Three to a Loaf by Canada's Michael Goodspeed.
gave rise to a new boom in contemporary war novels. Unlike World War I novels, a European-dominated genre, World War II novels were produced in the greatest numbers by American writers, who made war in the air, on the sea, and in key theatres such as the Pacific Ocean
and Asia
integral to the war novel. Among the most successful American war novels were Herman Wouk
's The Caine Mutiny
, James Jones
's From Here to Eternity
, and Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls
, the latter a novel set in the Spanish Civil War
.
An exception to American writers was Pierre Boulle
's Le Pont de la rivière Kwaï (1952), translated as The Bridge over the River Kwai. He served as a secret agent under the name Peter John Rule and helped the resistance movement in China, Burma and French Indochina.
More experimental and unconventional works in the post-war period included Joseph Heller
's satirical Catch-22
and Thomas Pynchon
's Gravity's Rainbow
, an early example of postmodernism
. Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead
, Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions
, William Woodruff's Vessel of Sadness and James Jones' The Thin Red Line
, all explore the personal nature of war within the context of intense combat.
The decades following World War II period also saw the rise in significant parallel genres to the war novel. One is the Holocaust novel, of which A.M. Klein's The Second Scroll
, Primo Levi
's If This is a Man
and If Not Now, When?, and William Styron
's Sophie's Choice
are key examples. Another is the novel of internment or persecution (other than in the Holocaust), in which characters find themselves imprisoned or deprived of their civil rights as a direct result of war. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
(about imprisonment in a Russian labor camp), and Joy Kogawa
's Obasan
(about Canada's deportation and internment of its citizens of Japanese descent during World War II) are two examples of novels that address war from alternative perspectives.
Almost immediately following World War II was the Korean War
(1950–1953). Richard Hooker's novel MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors
was a black comedy set in Korea during the war; it was later made into a movie and a successful television series. Also about the Korean war is Canadian Herbert Fairlie Wood's The Private War of Jacket Coates, another comedic take on the war.
. Graham Greene
's The Quiet American
was the first novel to explore the origins of the Vietnam war in the French colonial atmosphere of the 1950s. Tim O'Brien
's The Things They Carried
is a cycle of Vietnam vignettes
that reads like a novel. The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh
is a poignant account of the war from the Vietnamese perspective. For a critical overview of the different Vietnam War novels written or translated into English, see the Malda College-Assistant Professor Pinaki Roy's The Minds at War: Sensibilities in Select Vietnam War Novels, published in The Atlantic Literary Review Quarterly International (Volume 9, Number 4, October–December 2008, pp. 121–37).
In the wake of postmodernism
and the absence of wars equalling the magnitude of the two world wars, the majority of war novelists have concentrated on how memory
and the ambiguities of time affect the meaning and experience of war. In her Regeneration Trilogy
, British novelist Pat Barker
reimagines World War I from a contemporary perspective. Ian McEwan
's novels Black Dogs
and Atonement
take a similarly retrospective approach to World War II, including such events as the British retreat from Dunkirk in 1940 and the Nazi
invasion of France
. The work of W. G. Sebald
, most notably Austerlitz
, is a postmodern inquiry into German's struggle to come to terms with its troubled past.
Some contemporary novels emphasize action and intrigue above thematic depth. Tom Clancy
's The Hunt for Red October
is a technically detailed account of submarine espionage
during the Cold War
, and many of John le Carré
's spy novels are basically war novels for an age in which bureaucracy often replaces open combat. Another adaptation is the apocalyptic Christian
novel, which focuses on the final showdown between universal forces of good and evil. Tim LaHaye
is the author most readily associated with this genre. Many fantasy novels, too, use the traditional war novel as a departure point for depictions of fictional wars in imaginary realms.
The post–9/11
literary world has produced few war novels that address current events in the War on Terrorism
. One example is Chris Cleave
's Incendiary
(2005), which made headlines after its publication, for appearing to anticipate the 7 July 2005 London bombings
. Another is Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell.
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
in which the primary action takes place in a field of armed combat
Combat
Combat, or fighting, is a purposeful violent conflict meant to establish dominance over the opposition, or to terminate the opposition forever, or drive the opposition away from a location where it is not wanted or needed....
, or in a domestic setting (or home front
Home front
Home front is the informal term commonly used to describe the civilian populace of the nation at war as an active support system of their military....
) where the characters
Fictional character
A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...
are preoccupied with the preparations for, or recovery from, war
War
War is a state of organized, armed, and often prolonged conflict carried on between states, nations, or other parties typified by extreme aggression, social disruption, and usually high mortality. War should be understood as an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between political...
. It is sometimes referred to as military fiction.
Origins
The war novel's main roots lie in the epic poetryEpic poetry
An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...
of the classical
Classics
Classics is the branch of the Humanities comprising the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and other culture of the ancient Mediterranean world ; especially Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome during Classical Antiquity Classics (sometimes encompassing Classical Studies or...
and medieval periods, especially Homer
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
's The Iliad, Virgil
Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...
's The Aeneid, the Old English saga Beowulf
Beowulf
Beowulf , but modern scholars agree in naming it after the hero whose life is its subject." of an Old English heroic epic poem consisting of 3182 alliterative long lines, set in Scandinavia, commonly cited as one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature.It survives in a single...
, and different versions of the legends of King Arthur
King Arthur
King Arthur is a legendary British leader of the late 5th and early 6th centuries, who, according to Medieval histories and romances, led the defence of Britain against Saxon invaders in the early 6th century. The details of Arthur's story are mainly composed of folklore and literary invention, and...
. All of these epics were concerned with preserving the history
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
or mythology
Mythology
The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...
of conflicts between different societies, while providing an accessible narrative that could reinforce the collective memory
Collective memory
Collective memory refers to the shared pool of information held in the memories of two or more members of a group, and was coined by the philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. Collective memory can be shared, passed on and constructed by groups both small and large...
of a people. Other important influences on the war novel included the tragedies of such dramatists as Euripides
Euripides
Euripides was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him but according to the Suda it was ninety-two at most...
, Seneca the Younger
Seneca the Younger
Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and in one work humorist, of the Silver Age of Latin literature. He was tutor and later advisor to emperor Nero...
, Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe was an English dramatist, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. As the foremost Elizabethan tragedian, next to William Shakespeare, he is known for his blank verse, his overreaching protagonists, and his mysterious death.A warrant was issued for Marlowe's arrest on 18 May...
, and Shakespeare. Shakespeare's Henry V
Henry V (play)
Henry V is a history play by William Shakespeare, believed to be written in approximately 1599. Its full titles are The Cronicle History of Henry the Fifth and The Life of Henry the Fifth...
provided a model for how the history, tactics
Military tactics
Military tactics, the science and art of organizing an army or an air force, are the techniques for using weapons or military units in combination for engaging and defeating an enemy in battle. Changes in philosophy and technology over time have been reflected in changes to military tactics. In...
, and ethics
Ethics
Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...
of war could be combined in an essentially fictional framework. Romance
Romance (genre)
As a literary genre of high culture, romance or chivalric romance is a style of heroic prose and verse narrative that was popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a knight errant portrayed as...
s and satire
Satire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...
s in Early Modern Europe
Early modern Europe
Early modern Europe is the term used by historians to refer to a period in the history of Europe which spanned the centuries between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, roughly the late 15th century to the late 18th century...
--Edmund Spenser
Edmund Spenser
Edmund Spenser was an English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognised as one of the premier craftsmen of Modern English verse in its infancy, and one of the greatest poets in the English...
's The Faerie Queene
The Faerie Queene
The Faerie Queene is an incomplete English epic poem by Edmund Spenser. The first half was published in 1590, and a second installment was published in 1596. The Faerie Queene is notable for its form: it was the first work written in Spenserian stanza and is one of the longest poems in the English...
and Miguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His magnum opus, Don Quixote, considered the first modern novel, is a classic of Western literature, and is regarded amongst the best works of fiction ever written...
's Don Quixote, to name two of many—also contained elements of military heroism and folly that influenced the later development of war novels. In terms of imagery and symbol
Symbol
A symbol is something which represents an idea, a physical entity or a process but is distinct from it. The purpose of a symbol is to communicate meaning. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On a map, a picture of a tent might represent a campsite. Numerals are symbols for...
ism, many modern war novels (especially those espousing an anti-war
Anti-war
An anti-war movement is a social movement, usually in opposition to a particular nation's decision to start or carry on an armed conflict, unconditional of a maybe-existing just cause. The term can also refer to pacifism, which is the opposition to all use of military force during conflicts. Many...
viewpoint) take their cue from Dante
DANTE
Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe is a not-for-profit organisation that plans, builds and operates the international networks that interconnect the various national research and education networks in Europe and surrounding regions...
's depiction of Hell
Hell
In many religious traditions, a hell is a place of suffering and punishment in the afterlife. Religions with a linear divine history often depict hells as endless. Religions with a cyclic history often depict a hell as an intermediary period between incarnations...
in The Inferno, John Milton
John Milton
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...
's account of the war in Heaven
Heaven
Heaven, the Heavens or Seven Heavens, is a common religious cosmological or metaphysical term for the physical or transcendent place from which heavenly beings originate, are enthroned or inhabit...
in Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. It was originally published in 1667 in ten books, with a total of over ten thousand individual lines of verse...
, and the Apocalypse
Apocalypse
An Apocalypse is a disclosure of something hidden from the majority of mankind in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception, i.e. the veil to be lifted. The Apocalypse of John is the Book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament...
as depicted in the Book of Revelation
Book of Revelation
The Book of Revelation is the final book of the New Testament. The title came into usage from the first word of the book in Koine Greek: apokalupsis, meaning "unveiling" or "revelation"...
. Notable non-western example of war novel include Luo Guanzhong
Luo Guanzhong
Luo Ben , better known by his style name Luo Guanzhong , was a Chinese writer of the early Ming Dynasty period of Chinese history. He was also known as Huhai Sanren...
's Romance of the Three Kingdoms
Romance of the Three Kingdoms
Romance of the Three Kingdoms, written by Luo Guanzhong in the 14th century, is a Chinese historical novel based on the events in the turbulent years near the end of the Han Dynasty and the Three Kingdoms era of Chinese history, starting in 169 and ending with the reunification of the land in...
.
As the prose
Prose
Prose is the most typical form of written language, applying ordinary grammatical structure and natural flow of speech rather than rhythmic structure...
fiction novel rose to prominence in the seventeenth century, the war novel began to develop its modern form, although most novels featuring war were picaresque satires in which the soldier
Soldier
A soldier is a member of the land component of national armed forces; whereas a soldier hired for service in a foreign army would be termed a mercenary...
was rakish rather than realistic figure. An example of one such work is Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen
Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen
Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen was a German author.-Biography:Grimmelshausen was born at Gelnhausen. At the age of ten he was kidnapped by Hessian soldiery, and in their midst tasted the adventures of military life in the Thirty Years' War...
's Simplicissimus
Simplicissimus
Simplicissimus was a satirical German weekly magazine started by Albert Langen in April 1896 and published through 1967, with a hiatus from 1944-1954. It became a biweekly in 1964...
, a semi-autobiographical account of the Thirty Years' War
Thirty Years' War
The Thirty Years' War was fought primarily in what is now Germany, and at various points involved most countries in Europe. It was one of the most destructive conflicts in European history....
.
19th century war novels
The war novel came of age during the nineteenth century. Works such as StendhalStendhal
Marie-Henri Beyle , better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer. Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism in his two novels Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme...
's The Charterhouse of Parma
The Charterhouse of Parma
The Charterhouse of Parma is a novel published in 1839 by Stendhal.-Plot summary:The Charterhouse of Parma tells the story of the young Italian nobleman Fabrice del Dongo and his adventures from his birth in 1798 to his death...
, featuring the Battle of Waterloo
Battle of Waterloo
The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday 18 June 1815 near Waterloo in present-day Belgium, then part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands...
, Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
's War and Peace
War and Peace
War and Peace is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, first published in 1869. The work is epic in scale and is regarded as one of the most important works of world literature...
, about the Napoleonic Wars
Napoleonic Wars
The Napoleonic Wars were a series of wars declared against Napoleon's French Empire by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815. As a continuation of the wars sparked by the French Revolution of 1789, they revolutionised European armies and played out on an unprecedented scale, mainly due to...
in Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
, and Stephen Crane
Stephen Crane
Stephen Crane was an American novelist, short story writer, poet and journalist. Prolific throughout his short life, he wrote notable works in the Realist tradition as well as early examples of American Naturalism and Impressionism...
's The Red Badge of Courage
The Red Badge of Courage
The Red Badge of Courage is a war novel by American author Stephen Crane . Taking place during the American Civil War, the story is about a young private of the Union Army, Henry Fleming, who flees from the field of battle. Overcome with shame, he longs for a wound—a "red badge of courage"—to...
, about the American Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
established the conventions of the modern war novel as it has come down to us today. All of these works feature realistic depictions of major battle
Battle
Generally, a battle is a conceptual component in the hierarchy of combat in warfare between two or more armed forces, or combatants. In a battle, each combatant will seek to defeat the others, with defeat determined by the conditions of a military campaign...
s, visceral scenes of wartime horrors and atrocities, and significant insights into the nature of heroism, cowardice
Cowardice
Cowardice is the perceived failure to demonstrate sufficient mental robustness and courage in the face of a challenge. Under many military codes of justice, cowardice in the face of combat is a crime punishable by death...
, and morality
Morality
Morality is the differentiation among intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are good and bad . A moral code is a system of morality and a moral is any one practice or teaching within a moral code...
in war
.
World War I and after
World War IWorld War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
produced an unprecedented number of war novels, by writers from countries on all sides of the conflict. One of the first and most influential of these was the 1916 novel Le Feu (or Under Fire
Under Fire (novel)
Under Fire: The Story of a Squad by Henri Barbusse , was one of the first novels about World War I to be published...
) by the French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
novelist and soldier Henri Barbusse
Henri Barbusse
Henri Barbusse was a French novelist and a member of the French Communist Party.-Life:...
. Barbusse's novel, with its open criticism of nationalist dogma and military incompetence, initiated the anti-war movement in literature that flourished after the war.
Of equal significance is the autobiographical work of Ernst Jünger
Ernst Jünger
Ernst Jünger was a German writer. In addition to his novels and diaries, he is well known for Storm of Steel, an account of his experience during World War I. Some say he was one of Germany's greatest modern writers and a hero of the conservative revolutionary movement following World War I...
, Storm of Steel
Storm of Steel
Storm of Steel is the memoir of German officer Ernst Jünger's experiences on the Western Front during the First World War. It was originally printed privately in 1920, making it one of the first personal accounts to be published. The book is a graphic account of trench warfare...
. Distinctly separate from novels like Barbusse's and later Erich Maria Remarque
Erich Maria Remarque
Erich Maria Remarque was a German author, best known for his novel All Quiet on the Western Front.-Life and work:...
's Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front
All Quiet on the Western Front
All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I. The book describes the German soldiers' extreme physical and mental stress during the war, and the detachment from civilian life felt by many of these soldiers upon returning home from the front.The...
), Jünger instead writes of the war as a valiant hero who embraced combat and brotherhood in spite of the horror. The work not only provides for an under-represented perspective of the War, but it also gives insight into the German sentiment that they were never actually defeated in the First World War.
The post-1918 period produced a vast range of war novels, including such "home front" novels as Rebecca West
Rebecca West
Cicely Isabel Fairfield , known by her pen name Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, DBE was an English author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. A prolific, protean author who wrote in many genres, West was committed to feminist and liberal principles and was one of the foremost public...
's The Return of the Soldier
The Return of the Soldier
The Return of the Soldier is the debut novel of English novelist Rebecca West first published in 1918. The novel recounts the return of the shell shocked Captain Chris Baldry from the trenches of The First World War from the perspective of his female cousin Jenny...
, about a shell shock
Shell Shock
Shell Shock, also known as 82nd Marines Attack was a 1964 film by B-movie director John Hayes. The film takes place in Italy during World War II, and tells the story of a sergeant with his group of soldiers....
ed soldier's difficult re-integration into British society; Romain Rolland
Romain Rolland
Romain Rolland was a French dramatist, novelist, essayist, art historian and mystic who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915.-Biography:...
's Clérambault, about a grieving father's enraged protest against French militarism
Militarism
Militarism is defined as: the belief or desire of a government or people that a country should maintain a strong military capability and be prepared to use it aggressively to defend or promote national interests....
; and John Dos Passos
John Dos Passos
John Roderigo Dos Passos was an American novelist and artist.-Early life:Born in Chicago, Illinois, Dos Passos was the illegitimate son of John Randolph Dos Passos , a distinguished lawyer of Madeiran Portuguese descent, and Lucy Addison Sprigg Madison of Petersburg, Virginia. The elder Dos Passos...
's Three Soldiers
Three Soldiers
Three Soldiers is a 1920 novel by the American writer and critic John Dos Passos. It is one of the key American war novels of the First World War, and remains a classic of the realist war novel genre. H.L. Mencken, then practising primarily as an American literary critic, praised the book in the...
, one of a relatively small number of American novels about the First World War.
Also in the post–World War I period, the theme of war began to inhabit an increasing number of modernist novels, many of which were not "war novels" in the conventional sense, but which featured characters whose psychological trauma
Psychological trauma
Psychological trauma is a type of damage to the psyche that occurs as a result of a traumatic event...
and alienation
Social alienation
The term social alienation has many discipline-specific uses; Roberts notes how even within the social sciences, it “is used to refer both to a personal psychological state and to a type of social relationship”...
from society stemmed directly from wartime experiences. One example this type of novel is Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
's Mrs. Dalloway, in which a key subplot
Subplot
A subplot is a secondary plot strand that is a supporting side story for any story or the main plot. Subplots may connect to main plots, in either time and place or in thematic significance...
concerns the tortuous descent of a young veteran, Septimus Warren Smith, toward insanity and suicide
Suicide
Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...
.
The late 1920s saw the rise of the so-called "war book boom," during which many men who had fought during the war were finally ready to write openly and critically about their war experiences. In 1924, Laurence Stallings
Laurence Stallings
Laurence Tucker Stallings was an American playwright, screenwriter, lyricist, literary critic, journalist, novelist, and photographer...
wrote, one of the first autobiographical war novels, Plumes. In 1929, Erich Maria Remarque
Erich Maria Remarque
Erich Maria Remarque was a German author, best known for his novel All Quiet on the Western Front.-Life and work:...
's Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front
All Quiet on the Western Front
All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I. The book describes the German soldiers' extreme physical and mental stress during the war, and the detachment from civilian life felt by many of these soldiers upon returning home from the front.The...
) was a massive, worldwide bestseller
Bestseller
A bestseller is a book that is identified as extremely popular by its inclusion on lists of currently top selling titles that are based on publishing industry and book trade figures and published by newspapers, magazines, or bookstore chains. Some lists are broken down into classifications and...
, not least for its brutally realistic account of the horrors of trench warfare
Trench warfare
Trench warfare is a form of occupied fighting lines, consisting largely of trenches, in which troops are largely immune to the enemy's small arms fire and are substantially sheltered from artillery...
from the perspective of a German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
infantryman. Less well known but equally shocking in its account of the horrors of trench warfare is Stratis Myrivilis
Stratis Myrivilis
Stratis Myrivilis , a major figure in the literary history of 20th Century Greece, is the pseudonym of Efstratios Stamatopoulos. He wrote mostly fiction: novels, novellas, and short stories.- Biography :...
' Greek novel Life in the Tomb, which was first published in serialised form in the weekly newspaper Kambana (April 1923 - January 1924), and then in revised and much expanded form in 1930. Also successful were Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
's A Farewell to Arms
A Farewell to Arms
A Farewell to Arms is a semi-autobiographical novel written by Ernest Hemingway concerning events during the Italian campaigns during the First World War. The book, which was first published in 1929, is a first-person account of American Frederic Henry, serving as a Lieutenant in the ambulance...
, William March
William March
William March was an American author and a highly decorated US Marine. The author of six novels and four short-story collections, March was praised by critics and heralded as "the unrecognized genius of our time", without attaining popular appeal until after his death.March grew up in rural...
's Company K
Company K
Company K is a 1933 novel by William March, first serialised in parts in the New York magazine Forum from 1930 to 1932, and published in its entirety by Smith and Haas on 19 January 1933, in New York. The book's title was taken from the Marine company that March served in during World War I...
, Richard Aldington
Richard Aldington
Richard Aldington , born Edward Godfree Aldington, was an English writer and poet.Aldington was best known for his World War I poetry, the 1929 novel, Death of a Hero, and the controversy arising from his 1955 Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Inquiry...
's Death of a Hero
Death of a Hero
Death of a Hero is a World War I novel by Richard Aldington. It was his first novel, written in 1929, and thought to be partly autobiographical.-Plot summary:...
, Arnold Zweig
Arnold Zweig
Arnold Zweig was a German writer and anti-war activist.He is best known for his World War I tetralogy.-Life and work:Zweig was born in Glogau, Silesia son of a Jewish saddler...
's Der Streit un den Sergeanten Grischa (The Case of Sergeant Grischa
The Case of Sergeant Grischa
The Case of Sergeant Grischa is a war novel by the German writer Arnold Zweig. Its original German title is Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa. It is part of Zweig's hexalogy Der große Krieg der weißen Männer...
), and Charles Yale Harrison
Charles Yale Harrison
Charles Yale Harrison was a Canadian author and journalist, best known for his 1930 anti-war novella Generals Die in Bed.-Early life:...
's Generals Die in Bed
Generals Die in Bed
Generals Die in Bed is an anti-war novella by the Canadian writer Charles Yale Harrison. Based on the author's own experiences in combat, it tells the story of a young soldier fighting in the trenches of World War I...
.
Novels about World War I continued to trickle into print throughout the 1930s. One particular development during this decade was the rise in popularity of historical novel
Historical novel
According to Encyclopædia Britannica, a historical novel is-Development:An early example of historical prose fiction is Luó Guànzhōng's 14th century Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which covers one of the most important periods of Chinese history and left a lasting impact on Chinese culture.The...
s about earlier wars. Margaret Mitchell
Margaret Mitchell
Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was an American author and journalist. Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937 for her epic American Civil War era novel, Gone with the Wind, which was the only novel by Mitchell published during her lifetime.-Family:Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta,...
's Gone with the Wind
Gone with the Wind
The slaves depicted in Gone with the Wind are primarily loyal house servants, such as Mammy, Pork and Uncle Peter, and these slaves stay on with their masters even after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 sets them free...
, which recalls the American Civil War, is an example of works of this type. The turn of the 20th and 21st centuries saw yet another resurgence of interest in novels of the First World War. Pat Barker
Pat Barker
Pat Barker CBE, FRSL is an English writer and novelist. She has won many awards for her fiction, which centres around themes of memory, trauma, survival and recovery. Her work is described as direct, blunt and plainspoken.-Personal life:...
's trilogy: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and Ghost Road certainly illustrated the ongoing fascination with the "War to end Wars" as did more recent works such as Three to a Loaf by Canada's Michael Goodspeed.
World War II and after
World War IIWorld War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
gave rise to a new boom in contemporary war novels. Unlike World War I novels, a European-dominated genre, World War II novels were produced in the greatest numbers by American writers, who made war in the air, on the sea, and in key theatres such as the Pacific Ocean
Pacific Ocean
The Pacific Ocean is the largest of the Earth's oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic in the north to the Southern Ocean in the south, bounded by Asia and Australia in the west, and the Americas in the east.At 165.2 million square kilometres in area, this largest division of the World...
and Asia
Asia
Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...
integral to the war novel. Among the most successful American war novels were Herman Wouk
Herman Wouk
Herman Wouk is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author of novels including The Caine Mutiny, The Winds of War, and War and Remembrance.-Biography:...
's The Caine Mutiny
The Caine Mutiny
The Caine Mutiny is a 1952 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Herman Wouk. The novel grew out of Wouk's personal experiences aboard a destroyer-minesweeper in the Pacific in World War II and deals with, among other things, the moral and ethical decisions made at sea by the captains of ships...
, James Jones
James Jones (author)
James Jones was an American author known for his explorations of World War II and its aftermath.-Life and work:...
's From Here to Eternity
From Here to Eternity
From Here to Eternity is a 1953 drama film directed by Fred Zinnemann and based on the novel of the same name by James Jones. It deals with the troubles of soldiers, played by Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Frank Sinatra and Ernest Borgnine stationed on Hawaii in the months leading up to the...
, and Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls
For Whom the Bell Tolls
For Whom the Bell Tolls is a novel by Ernest Hemingway published in 1940. It tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to a republican guerrilla unit during the Spanish Civil War. As an expert in the use of explosives, he is assigned to blow up a...
, the latter a novel set in the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
.
An exception to American writers was Pierre Boulle
Pierre Boulle
Pierre Boulle was a French novelist largely known for two famous works, The Bridge over the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes .-Biography:...
's Le Pont de la rivière Kwaï (1952), translated as The Bridge over the River Kwai. He served as a secret agent under the name Peter John Rule and helped the resistance movement in China, Burma and French Indochina.
More experimental and unconventional works in the post-war period included Joseph Heller
Joseph Heller
Joseph Heller was a US satirical novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His best known work is Catch-22, a novel about US servicemen during World War II...
's satirical Catch-22
Catch-22
Catch-22 is a satirical, historical novel by the American author Joseph Heller. He began writing it in 1953, and the novel was first published in 1961. It is set during World War II in 1943 and is frequently cited as one of the great literary works of the twentieth century...
and Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
's Gravity's Rainbow
Gravity's Rainbow
Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern novel written by Thomas Pynchon and first published on February 28, 1973.The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military, and, in particular, the quest...
, an early example of postmodernism
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
. Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead
The Naked and the Dead
The Naked and the Dead is a 1948 novel by Norman Mailer. It was based on his experiences with the 112th Cavalry Regiment during the Philippines Campaign in World War II...
, Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions
The Young Lions
The Young Lions is a 1958 war drama film directed by Edward Dmytryk, based upon the 1949 novel of the same name by Irwin Shaw, and starring Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and Dean Martin.-Outline:...
, William Woodruff's Vessel of Sadness and James Jones' The Thin Red Line
The Thin Red Line (1962 novel)
The Thin Red Line is author James Jones's fictional account of the World War II Galloping Horse portion of the Battle of Mount Austen, specifically Hill 53, during the Guadalcanal campaign, which he experienced firsthand in the United States Army's 25th Infantry Division...
, all explore the personal nature of war within the context of intense combat.
The decades following World War II period also saw the rise in significant parallel genres to the war novel. One is the Holocaust novel, of which A.M. Klein's The Second Scroll
The Second Scroll
The Second Scroll is a 1951 novel by the Jewish-Canadian writer A. M. Klein. Klein's only novel was written after his pilgrimage to the newly-founded nation of Israel in 1949...
, Primo Levi
Primo Levi
Primo Michele Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist and writer. He was the author of two novels and several collections of short stories, essays, and poems, but is best known for If This Is a Man, his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland...
's If This is a Man
If This Is a Man
If This Is a Man is a work by the Italian writer, Primo Levi, describing his 11 months—from February 21, 1944 until liberation on January 27, 1945—in the German concentration camp at Auschwitz in Poland, during the Second World War...
and If Not Now, When?, and William Styron
William Styron
William Clark Styron, Jr. was an American novelist and essayist who won major literary awards for his work.For much of his career, Styron was best known for his novels, which included...
's Sophie's Choice
Sophie's Choice (novel)
Sophie's Choice is a novel by William Styron published in 1979. It concerns a young American Southerner, an aspiring writer, who befriends the Jewish Nathan Landau and his beautiful lover Sophie, a Polish survivor of the Nazi concentration camps...
are key examples. Another is the novel of internment or persecution (other than in the Holocaust), in which characters find themselves imprisoned or deprived of their civil rights as a direct result of war. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was aRussian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of...
's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a novel written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, first published in November 1962 in the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir . The story is set in a Soviet labor camp in the 1950s, and describes a single day of an ordinary prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov...
(about imprisonment in a Russian labor camp), and Joy Kogawa
Joy Kogawa
Joy Nozomi Kogawa, CM, OBC is a Canadian poet and novelist of Japanese descent.-Life:Born Joy Nozomi Nakayama in Vancouver, British Columbia, she was sent with her family to the internment camp for Japanese Canadians at Slocan during World War II...
's Obasan
Obasan
Obasan is a novel by the Japanese-Canadian author Joy Kogawa. First published by Lester and Orpen Dennys in 1981, it chronicles Canada's internment and persecution of its citizens of Japanese descent during World War II from the perspective of a young child...
(about Canada's deportation and internment of its citizens of Japanese descent during World War II) are two examples of novels that address war from alternative perspectives.
Almost immediately following World War II was the Korean War
Korean War
The Korean War was a conventional war between South Korea, supported by the United Nations, and North Korea, supported by the People's Republic of China , with military material aid from the Soviet Union...
(1950–1953). Richard Hooker's novel MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors
MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors
MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors, the original novel that inspired the film MASH and TV series M*A*S*H, was written by Richard Hooker, himself a former military surgeon, and was about a fictional U.S. Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea during the Korean War. It was originally published in...
was a black comedy set in Korea during the war; it was later made into a movie and a successful television series. Also about the Korean war is Canadian Herbert Fairlie Wood's The Private War of Jacket Coates, another comedic take on the war.
Vietnam and after
After World War II, the war that has attracted the greatest number of novelists is the Vietnam WarVietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
. Graham Greene
Graham Greene
Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH was an English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world...
's The Quiet American
The Quiet American
The Quiet American is an anti-war novel by British author Graham Greene, first published in United Kingdom in 1955 and in the United States in 1956. It was adapted into films in 1958 and 2002. The book draws on Greene's experiences as a war correspondent for The Times and Le Figaro in French...
was the first novel to explore the origins of the Vietnam war in the French colonial atmosphere of the 1950s. Tim O'Brien
Tim O'Brien (author)
Tim O'Brien is an American novelist who often writes about his experiences in the Vietnam War and the impact the war had on the American servicemen who fought there...
's The Things They Carried
The Things They Carried
The Things They Carried is a collection of related stories by Tim O'Brien, about a platoon of American soldiers in the Vietnam War, originally published in hardcover by Houghton Mifflin, 1990...
is a cycle of Vietnam vignettes
Vignette (literature)
In theatrical script writing, sketch stories, and poetry, a vignette is a short impressionistic scene that focuses on one moment or gives a trenchant impression about a character, an idea, or a setting and sometimes an object...
that reads like a novel. The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh
Bao Ninh
Bảo Ninh is a Vietnamese novelist and short story writer.His real name is Hoàng Ấu Phương and he was born in Nghệ An province , Vietnam. During the Vietnam War, he served in the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade...
is a poignant account of the war from the Vietnamese perspective. For a critical overview of the different Vietnam War novels written or translated into English, see the Malda College-Assistant Professor Pinaki Roy's The Minds at War: Sensibilities in Select Vietnam War Novels, published in The Atlantic Literary Review Quarterly International (Volume 9, Number 4, October–December 2008, pp. 121–37).
In the wake of postmodernism
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
and the absence of wars equalling the magnitude of the two world wars, the majority of war novelists have concentrated on how memory
Memory
In psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and recall information and experiences. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing memory....
and the ambiguities of time affect the meaning and experience of war. In her Regeneration Trilogy
Regeneration Trilogy
The Regeneration Trilogy is a series of three novels by Pat Barker on the subject of the First World War.* Regeneration * The Eye in the Door * The Ghost Road...
, British novelist Pat Barker
Pat Barker
Pat Barker CBE, FRSL is an English writer and novelist. She has won many awards for her fiction, which centres around themes of memory, trauma, survival and recovery. Her work is described as direct, blunt and plainspoken.-Personal life:...
reimagines World War I from a contemporary perspective. Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan
Ian Russell McEwan CBE, FRSA, FRSL is a British novelist and screenwriter, and one of Britain's most highly regarded writers. In 2008, The Times named him among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945"....
's novels Black Dogs
Black Dogs
Black Dogs is a 1992 novel by the Booker Prize-winning British author Ian McEwan.-Summary:The novel concerns the aftermath of the Nazi era in Europe, and how the fall of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s affected those who once saw Communism as a way forward for society...
and Atonement
Atonement (novel)
Atonement is a 2001 novel by British author Ian McEwan.On a fateful day, a young girl makes a terrible mistake that has life-changing effects for many people...
take a similarly retrospective approach to World War II, including such events as the British retreat from Dunkirk in 1940 and the Nazi
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
invasion of France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
. The work of W. G. Sebald
W. G. Sebald
W. G. Maximilian Sebald was a German writer and academic. At the time of his death at the age of 57, he was being cited by many literary critics as one of the greatest living authors and had been tipped as a possible future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature...
, most notably Austerlitz
Austerlitz (novel)
Austerlitz is the final novel of W. G. Sebald, published in 2001. The book received the National Book Critics Circle Award.-Plot summary:...
, is a postmodern inquiry into German's struggle to come to terms with its troubled past.
Some contemporary novels emphasize action and intrigue above thematic depth. Tom Clancy
Tom Clancy
Thomas Leo "Tom" Clancy, Jr. is an American author, best known for his technically detailed espionage, military science, and techno thriller storylines set during and in the aftermath of the Cold War, along with video games on which he did not work, but which bear his name for licensing and...
's The Hunt for Red October
The Hunt for Red October
The Hunt for Red October is a 1984 novel by Tom Clancy. The story follows the intertwined adventures of Soviet submarine captain Marko Aleksandrovich Ramius and CIA analyst Jack Ryan.The novel was originally published by the U.S...
is a technically detailed account of submarine espionage
Espionage
Espionage or spying involves an individual obtaining information that is considered secret or confidential without the permission of the holder of the information. Espionage is inherently clandestine, lest the legitimate holder of the information change plans or take other countermeasures once it...
during the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
, and many of John le Carré
John le Carré
David John Moore Cornwell , who writes under the name John le Carré, is an author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and the 1960s, Cornwell worked for MI5 and MI6, and began writing novels under the pseudonym "John le Carré"...
's spy novels are basically war novels for an age in which bureaucracy often replaces open combat. Another adaptation is the apocalyptic Christian
Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...
novel, which focuses on the final showdown between universal forces of good and evil. Tim LaHaye
Tim LaHaye
Timothy F. LaHaye is an American evangelical Christian minister, author, and speaker. He is best known for the Left Behind series of apocalyptic fiction, which he co-wrote with Jerry B. Jenkins. He has written over 50 books, both fiction and non-fiction.-Early life:LaHaye was born in Detroit,...
is the author most readily associated with this genre. Many fantasy novels, too, use the traditional war novel as a departure point for depictions of fictional wars in imaginary realms.
The post–9/11
September 11, 2001 attacks
The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks (also referred to as September 11, September 11th or 9/119/11 is pronounced "nine eleven". The slash is not part of the pronunciation...
literary world has produced few war novels that address current events in the War on Terrorism
War on Terrorism
The War on Terror is a term commonly applied to an international military campaign led by the United States and the United Kingdom with the support of other North Atlantic Treaty Organisation as well as non-NATO countries...
. One example is Chris Cleave
Chris Cleave
-Biography:Cleave was born in London in 1973, brought up in Cameroon and Buckinghamshire, and educated at Balliol College, Oxford where he studied Psychology. He lives in the United Kingdom with his wife and three children.-Writing:...
's Incendiary
Incendiary (novel)
Incendiary is a novel by British writer Chris Cleave. When it was first published in the summer of 2005, it garnered international headlines for the eerie similarity of its plot to the 7 July 2005 London bombings in England carried out on the same day it was published. It won the 2005...
(2005), which made headlines after its publication, for appearing to anticipate the 7 July 2005 London bombings
7 July 2005 London bombings
The 7 July 2005 London bombings were a series of co-ordinated suicide attacks in the United Kingdom, targeting civilians using London's public transport system during the morning rush hour....
. Another is Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell.
See also
- Epic poetryEpic poetryAn epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...
- The Holocaust in Art and LiteratureThe Holocaust in art and literatureThere is a wide range of ways in which people have represented the Holocaust in popular culture.-Literature:Some of the more famous works are by Holocaust survivors or victims, such as Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, Jerzy Kosinski , Imre Kertész, Jean Améry, Edgar Hilsenrath, Anne...
- List of films based on war books
Other significant war novelists
- Michael ShaaraMichael ShaaraMichael Shaara was an American writer of science fiction, sports fiction, and historical fiction. He was born to Italian immigrant parents in Jersey City, New Jersey, graduated from Rutgers University in 1951, and served as a sergeant in the 82nd Airborne division...
("The Killer AngelsThe Killer AngelsThe Killer Angels is a historical novel by Michael Shaara that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975. The book tells the story of four days of the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War: June 30, 1863, as the troops of both the Union and the Confederacy move into battle around...
" - GettysburgGettysburg: A Novel of the Civil WarGettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War is an alternate history novel written by Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen. It was published in 2003 and became a New York Times bestseller. It is the first part in a trilogy in which the next books are respectively Grant Comes East and Never Call...
- American Civil WarAmerican Civil WarThe American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
) - Margaret MitchellMargaret MitchellMargaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was an American author and journalist. Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937 for her epic American Civil War era novel, Gone with the Wind, which was the only novel by Mitchell published during her lifetime.-Family:Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta,...
("Gone With The WindGone with the WindThe slaves depicted in Gone with the Wind are primarily loyal house servants, such as Mammy, Pork and Uncle Peter, and these slaves stay on with their masters even after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 sets them free...
"- American Civil War) - Jeff ShaaraJeffrey ShaaraJeffrey M. "Jeff" Shaara is an American novelist, the son of Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Shaara.Jeffrey Shaara was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey and grew up in Tallahassee, Florida...
("The Rising Tide (book)" - World War II and many other books) - Martin AmisMartin AmisMartin Louis Amis is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money and London Fields . He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but will step down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year...
(Time's ArrowTime's Arrow (novel)Time's Arrow: or The Nature of the Offence is a novel by Martin Amis. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize .- Plot summary :The novel recounts the life of a German Holocaust doctor in a disorienting reverse chronology...
- Holocaust) - David BergenDavid BergenDavid Bergen is a Canadian novelist from Winnipeg, Manitoba. He has published six novels and one collection of short stories since 1993...
(The Time In BetweenThe Time In BetweenThe Time in Between is a novel by Canadian author David Bergen. It deals with a man named Charles Boatman, who mysteriously returns to Vietnam, where he had been a soldier earlier in his life, and his children, Ada and Jon, who also go to Vietnam to search for him.Although generally called a war...
- Vietnam) - Elias CanettiElias CanettiElias Canetti was a Bulgarian-born modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer. He wrote in German and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power".-Life:...
(Auto da FeAuto Da FeAuto Da Fe were an Irish new wave musical group formed in Holland in 1980 by former Steeleye Span singer Gay Woods and Trevor Knight. The band's sound incorporated keyboards and electronics. Woods stated "It was the happiest musical time I ever had so far. I learned so much. I was ridding myself...
- World War I) - James ChapmanJames Chapman (author)James Chapman is an American novelist and publisher. He was raised in Bakersfield, California, has lived in New York City since 1978, and is the author of nine novels to date....
(Glass (Pray the Electrons Back to Sand) - Gulf War) - Charles Sheehan-MilesCharles Sheehan-MilesCharles Sheehan-Miles is an American veterans advocate and writer.He grew up in Atlanta, Georgia and served in the U.S. Army in the 1991 Persian Gulf War...
(Prayer at Rumayla: A Novel of the Gulf War - Gulf War) - Hugo ClausHugo ClausHugo Maurice Julien Claus was a leading Belgian author who published under his own name as well as various pseudonyms. Claus' literary contributions spanned the genres of drama, the novel, and poetry; he also left a legacy as a painter and film director...
(Sorrow of Belgium - World War I) - Stuart CloeteStuart CloeteEdward Fairly Stuart Graham Cloete was a South African novelist, essayist, biographer and short story writer.- Biography :Cloete was born in Paris, France to a French mother and South African father...
(Rags of Glory - South African War) - F. M. Cutlack (Breaker MorantBreaker MorantHarry 'Breaker' Harbord Morant was an Anglo-Australian drover, horseman, poet, soldier and convicted war criminal whose skill with horses earned him the nickname "The Breaker"...
- South African War) - E. L. DoctorowE. L. DoctorowEdgar Lawrence Doctorow is an American author.- Biography :Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was born in the Bronx, New York City, the son of second-generation Americans of Russian Jewish descent...
(The MarchThe March (novel)The March is a 2005 historical fiction novel by E. L. Doctorow. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award/Fiction .-Plot summary:...
- US Civil War) - William FaulknerWilliam FaulknerWilliam Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
(Soldiers' PaySoldiers' Pay (novel)thumb|First edition coverSoldiers' Pay is the first novel written by the American author William Faulkner. It was originally published in 1926.-Plot overview:...
- World War I) - Sebastian FaulksSebastian Faulks-Early life:Faulks was born on 20 April 1953 in Donnington, Berkshire to Peter Faulks and Pamela . Edward Faulks, Baron Faulks, is his older brother. He was educated at Elstree School, Reading and went on to Wellington College, Berkshire...
(BirdsongBirdsong (novel)Birdsong is a 1993 war novel by the English author Sebastian Faulks. Faulks' fourth novel, it tells of a man called Stephen Wraysford at different stages of his life both before and during World War I...
- World War I) - Frederic ManningFrederic ManningFrederic Manning was an Australian poet and novelist.-Biography:Born in Sydney, Manning was the son of local politician Sir William Patrick Manning. His family were Catholics, of Irish origin. A sickly child , Manning was educated exclusively at home...
(Her Privates We - World War I) - Timothy FindleyTimothy FindleyTimothy Irving Frederick Findley, OC, O.Ont was a Canadian novelist and playwright. He was also informally known by the nickname Tiff or Tiffy, an acronym of his initials.-Biography:...
(The WarsThe WarsThe Wars is a 1977 novel by Timothy Findley telling the story of a young Canadian officer in World War I. First published by Clarke Irwin, it won the Governor General's Award for fiction in 1977.-Plot overview:...
, Famous Last Words (book) - World War I/ II) - Ford Madox FordFord Madox FordFord Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature...
(Parade's EndParade's EndParade's End is a tetralogy by Ford Madox Ford published between 1924 and 1928. It is set mainly in England and on the Western Front in World War I, where Ford served as an officer in the Welch Regiment, a life vividly depicted in the novels.In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Parade's End 57th on...
- World War I) - Charles FrazierCharles FrazierCharles Frazier is an award-winning American historical novelist.Frazier was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1973. He earned an M.A. from Appalachian State University in the mid-1970s, and received his Ph.D. in English from the University...
(Cold MountainCold Mountain (novel)Cold Mountain is a 1997 historical fiction novel by Charles Frazier. It tells the story of W. P. Inman, a wounded deserter from the Confederate army near the end of the American Civil War who walks for months to return to Ada Monroe, the love of his life; the story shares several similarities with...
- US Civil War) - Robert GravesRobert GravesRobert von Ranke Graves 24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985 was an English poet, translator and novelist. During his long life he produced more than 140 works...
(I, ClaudiusI, ClaudiusI, Claudius is a novel by English writer Robert Graves, written in the form of an autobiography of the Roman Emperor Claudius. As such, it includes history of the Julio-Claudian Dynasty and Roman Empire, from Julius Caesar's assassination in 44 BC to Caligula's assassination in AD 41...
, et al. - Roman Wars) - Gustav HasfordGustav HasfordGustav Hasford was an American writer. His semi-autobiographical novel The Short-Timers was the basis of the film Full Metal Jacket.-Biography:...
(The Short-TimersThe Short-TimersThe Short-Timers is a 1979 semi-autobiographical novel by American former Marine Gustav Hasford,about his experience in the Vietnam War. It was later adapted into the 1987 film Full Metal Jacket by Hasford, Michael Herr, and Stanley Kubrick....
, The Phantom BlooperThe Phantom BlooperThe Phantom Blooper is a 1990 novel written by Gustav Hasford, and the sequel to The Short-Timers. It continues to follow James T. "Joker" Davis through his Vietnam odyssey...
- US Vietnam War) - Walter Dean MyersWalter Dean MyersWalter Dean Myers is an African American author of young adult literature. Myers has written over fifty books, including novels and nonfiction works. He has won the Coretta Scott King Award for African American authors five times...
(Fallen AngelsFallen Angels (Myers novel)Fallen Angels is a 1988 young adult novel written by Walter Dean Myers, about the Vietnam war. It won the 1989 Coretta Scott King Award. Fallen Angels is listed as number 24 in the American Library Association's list of 100 most frequently challenged books of 1990–2000 due to its use of profanity...
- US Vietnam War) - Frances ItaniFrances ItaniFrances Susan Itani is a Canadian fiction writer, poet and essayist.Itani was born in Belleville, Ontario and grew up in Quebec. She studied nursing in Montreal and North Carolina, a profession which she taught and practised for eight years. However, after enrolling in a writing class taught by W. O...
(DeafeningDeafeningDeafening is a 2003 novel written by Frances Itani.Author Frances Itani brings the reader to a small, pre-World War I Ontario town called Deseronto, where the O'Neil family owns a hotel. The book follows the story of Grania O'Neil, a girl who lost her hearing when she was five years old as a result...
- World War I) - Ha JinHa JinJīn Xuěfēi is a contemporary Chinese-American writer and novelist using the pen name Ha Jin . Ha comes from his favorite city, Harbin.-Early life:...
(War TrashWar TrashWar Trash is a novel by the Chinese author Ha Jin, who has long lived in the United States and who writes in English. It takes the form of a memoir written by the fictional character Yu Yuan, a man who eventually becomes a soldier in the Chinese People's Volunteer Army and who is sent to Korea to...
- Korean War) - Thomas KeneallyThomas KeneallyThomas Michael Keneally, AO is an Australian novelist, playwright and author of non-fiction. He is best known for writing Schindler's Ark, the Booker Prize-winning novel of 1982 which was inspired by the efforts of Poldek Pfefferberg, a Holocaust survivor...
(Schindler's ArkSchindler's ArkSchindler's Ark is a Booker Prize-winning novel published in 1982 by Australian Thomas Keneally, which was later adapted into the highly successful movie Schindler's List directed by Steven Spielberg...
- Holocaust) - William WoodruffWilliam WoodruffWilliam Woodruff was a professor of world history, but perhaps most noted for his two autobiographical works: The Road to Nab End and its sequel Beyond Nab End; both became bestsellers in the United Kingdom...
(Vessel of Sadness - World War II) - D. H. LawrenceD. H. LawrenceDavid Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
(KangarooKangaroo (novel)Kangaroo is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published in 1923. It is set in Australia.-Description:Kangaroo is an account of a visit to New South Wales by an English writer named Richard Lovat Somers, and his German wife Harriet, in the early 1920s...
- World War I) - Robert LudlumRobert LudlumRobert Ludlum was an American author of 23 thriller novels. The number of his books in print is estimated between 290–500 million copies. They have been published in 33 languages and 40 countries. Ludlum also published books under the pseudonyms Jonathan Ryder and Michael Shepherd.-Life and...
(The Bourne Identity et al. - Cold War) - Emilio LussuEmilio LussuEmilio Lussu was an Italian soldier, politician and a writer.-The soldier:Lussu was born in Armungia, province of Cagliari and graduated with a degree in law in 1914...
(Sardinian Brigade - World War I) - Józef MackiewiczJozef MackiewiczJózef Mackiewicz was a Polish writer and commentator. He staunchly opposed communism, referring to himself as "anticommunist by nationality".- Life and career :...
(The Road to Nowhere - World War II) - Colin McDougallColin McDougallColin Malcom McDougall DSO was a Canadian author best known for his 1958 Governor General's Award-winning novel Execution.-Biography:...
(ExecutionExecution (novel)Execution is a 1958 war novel by Canadian novelist and Second World War veteran Colin McDougall . Although it won McDougall the 1958 Governor General's Award for English language fiction, it was his only novel, and after publishing it to wide acclaim he retreated into a quiet life as Registrar of...
- World War II) - Boris PasternakBoris PasternakBoris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Russian language poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russia, Pasternak's anthology My Sister Life, is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language...
(Dr. ZhivagoDoctor Zhivago (novel)Doctor Zhivago is a 20th century novel by Boris Pasternak, first published in 1957. The novel is named after its protagonist, Yuri Zhivago, a physician and poet...
- Russian Revolution) - Siegfried SassoonSiegfried SassoonSiegfried Loraine Sassoon CBE MC was an English poet, author and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches, and satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's...
(Memoirs of an Infantry OfficerMemoirs of an Infantry OfficerMemoirs of an Infantry Officer is a novel by Siegfried Sassoon, first published in 1930. It is a fictionalised account of Sassoon's own life during and immediately after World War I...
- World War I) - Henryk SienkiewiczHenryk SienkiewiczHenryk Adam Aleksander Pius Sienkiewicz was a Polish journalist and Nobel Prize-winning novelist. A Polish szlachcic of the Oszyk coat of arms, he was one of the most popular Polish writers at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1905 for his...
(The TrilogyThe TrilogyIn modern culture, The Trilogy may also refer to George Lucas' The Trilogy. For the general use of the term "trilogy", see Trilogy.The Trilogy is a series of three novels written by the Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz. The series follows dramatized versions of famous events in Polish history,...
- Polish historical) - Kurt VonnegutKurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a 20th century American writer. His works such as Cat's Cradle , Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions blend satire, gallows humor and science fiction. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.-Early...
(Slaughterhouse Five - Vietnam / World War II) - Phil Ward (Those Who DareRaiding Forces SeriesThe Raiding Forces Series is a sequence of World War II novels, written by American novelist and Vietnam veteran Phil Ward.- Overview :Phil Ward, a decorated combat veteran and former instructor at the Army Ranger School, makes his literary debut with the release of the Raiding Forces Series...
- World War II) - Evelyn WaughEvelyn WaughArthur Evelyn St. John Waugh , known as Evelyn Waugh, was an English writer of novels, travel books and biographies. He was also a prolific journalist and reviewer...
(Sword of HonourSword of HonourThe Sword of Honour trilogy by Evelyn Waugh is his look at the Second World War. It consists of three novels, Men at Arms , Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender , which loosely parallel his wartime experiences...
- World War II) - J. G. BallardJ. G. BallardJames Graham Ballard was an English novelist, short story writer, and prominent member of the New Wave movement in science fiction...
(Empire of the SunEmpire of the SunEmpire of the Sun is a 1984 novel by J. G. Ballard which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Like Ballard's earlier short story, "The Dead Time" , it is essentially fiction but draws extensively on Ballard's experiences in World War II...
- World War II) - Leon UrisLeon UrisLeon Marcus Uris was an American novelist, known for his historical fiction and the deep research that went into his novels. His two bestselling books were Exodus, published in 1958, and Trinity, in 1976.-Life:...
(Battle Cry - World War II and Mila 18Mila 18Mila 18 is a novel by Leon Uris set in German-occupied Warsaw, Poland before and during World War II. Leon Uris's work, based on real events, covers the Nazi occupation of Poland and the atrocities of systematically dehumanising and eliminating the Jewish People of Poland...
- Holocaust) - Lothar-Guenther Buchheim (Das BootDas BootDas Boot is a 1981 German epic war film written and directed by Wolfgang Petersen, produced by Günter Rohrbach, and starring Jürgen Prochnow, Herbert Grönemeyer, and Klaus Wennemann...
- World War II) - Dalton TrumboDalton TrumboJames Dalton Trumbo was an American screenwriter and novelist, and one of the Hollywood Ten, a group of film professionals who refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 during the committee's investigation of Communist influences in the motion picture industry...
(Johnny Got His GunJohnny Got His GunJohnny Got His Gun is an anti-war novel written in 1938 by American novelist and screenwriter Dalton Trumboand published by J. B. Lippincott company.-Plot:...
- World War I ) - James Michener (The Bridges at Toko-RiThe Bridges at Toko-RiThe Bridges at Toko-Ri is a 1954 film based on a novel by James Michener about a naval aviator assigned to bomb a group of heavily defended bridges during the Korean War. It was made into a motion picture by Paramount Pictures and won the Special Effects Oscar at the 28th Academy Awards...
- Korean War ) - Alan Pearce (Dunkirk Spirit - World War II)
Critical studies of the war novel
- Beidler, Philip D., American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam (U Georgia Press)
- Bergonzi, Bernard, Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War (Macmillan).
- Buitenhuis, Peter, The Great War of Words: British, American and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914-1933 (UBC Press).
- Casadei, Alberto, Romanzi di Finisterre: Narrazione della guerra e problemi del realismo, Roma, Carocci, 2000.
- Cobley, Evelyn, Representing War: Form and Ideology in First World War Narratives (U of Toronto Press).
- Cooperman, Stanley, World War I and the American Novel (Johns Hopkins UP).
- Dawes, James, "The Language of War" (Harvard UP).
- Fussell, PaulPaul FussellPaul Fussell is an American cultural and literary historian, author and university professor. His writings cover a variety of genres, from scholarly works on eighteenth-century English literature to commentary on America’s class system...
, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford UP), Wartime (Oxford UP). - Craig, David and Michael Egan. Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War to the Atom Bomb (Macmillan).
- Friedman, Saul S. (Ed.) Holocaust Literature: A Collection of Critical, Historical, and Literary Writings (Greenwood Press)
- Harvey, A.D., A Muse of Fire: Literature, Art and War, London, Hambledon Press, 1998.
- Horowitz, Sara R, Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction (SUNY UP). ISBN 0-7914-3130-4
- Isnenghi, Mario, Il mito della grande guerra (Bologna, Il Mulino).
- Madison and Schaefer (Eds.), Encyclopedia of American War Literature (Greenwood Press). ISBN 0-313-30648-6
- Novak, Dagmar, Dubious Glory: The Canadian Novel and the Two World Wars (Peter Lang).
- Rossi, Umberto, Il secolo di fuoco: Introduzione alla letteratura di guerra del Novecento, Roma, Bulzoni, 2008. ISBN 978-88-7870-320-9
- Roy, Pinaki, The Scarlet Critique, New Delhi, Sarup Book Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 2010, ISBN 978-81-7625-991-0
- Wilson, EdmundEdmund WilsonEdmund Wilson was an American writer and literary and social critic and noted man of letters.-Early life:Wilson was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. His father, Edmund Wilson, Sr., was a lawyer and served as New Jersey Attorney General. Wilson attended The Hill School, a college preparatory...
, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (WW Norton).