Authoring War

Authoring War, Volume 1, provides an ambitious and pioneering study of war writing across all literary genres from antiquity to the modern era. Kate McLoughlin examines how writers across diverse cultures meet the immense challenge of representing violence, chaos, and loss. This scholarly work explores the epistemological problems of scale, space, time, and language that arise when documenting conflict. By focusing on the importance of literary form, the text establishes profound connections across different historical periods and cultural landscapes.

This volume in the war and literature category connects Homeric epics to the contemporary War on Terror. McLoughlin utilizes close rhetorical analysis to group texts in innovative ways, reading Byron's Don Juan alongside Heller's Catch-22 and pairing English Civil War poetry with Second World War letters. Authoring War serves as a comprehensive resource for anyone studying war in literature through an encyclopedic and inventive lens.