Sacrifice and Modern War Writing: Atavisms, Martyrdoms, and Economies of Loss by Houen, Alex

Sacrifice and Modern War Writing: Atavisms, Martyrdoms, and Economies of Loss (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780198912286)

Vendor: Alex Houen
Product type: Books
Format: Hardcover
$115.00
$115.00
$115.00
Subtotal: $115.00
Sacrifice and Modern War Writing: Atavisms, Martyrdoms, and Economies of Loss by Houen, Alex

Sacrifice and Modern War Writing: Atavisms, Martyrdoms, and Economies of Loss

$115.00
Sacrifice and Modern War Writing: Atavisms, Martyrdoms, and Economies of Loss by Houen, Alex

Sacrifice and Modern War Writing: Atavisms, Martyrdoms, and Economies of Loss

$115.00
Format: Hardcover
Description
Description
x
Sacrifice and Modern War Writing presents the most extensive study to date of twentieth- and twenty-first-century war writing. Examining works by over 110 authors, Alex Houen surveys how war writing explores sacrifice in relation to major modern and contemporary conflicts, from the First World War to the War on Terror. Various conceptions of sacrifice are examined, including Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and secular. The discussion ranges across literary portrayals of multiple sacrificial practices, including ancient rituals of child sacrifice, martyrdom, scapegoating, and suicide bombing. Houen builds an innovative interdisciplinary approach to how war, sacrifice, and their representations interrelate, and a wide range of Anglophone literature is discussed, including novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, manifestoes, elegies, ballads, and lyric poetry.

Whereas critics and theorists have tended to emphasize that war's reality exceeds any attempt to represent it, Houen contends that political, religious, and cultural frames of sacrifice have continued to play a significant part in shaping how war's reality is shaped and experienced. Those frames are inextricably tied to modes of representation, which include symbolism and mimesis. Sacrifice and Modern War Writing explores how sacrificial killing in war is itself riddled with symbolic transfigurations and mimetic exchanges, and it builds a fresh approach by arguing that the figurative and imaginative aspects of literary writing ironically become its very means of engaging closely with the reality of war's sacrifices. That approach also develops by using the literary analyses to critique and revise various prominent theories of sacrifice and war.

Author: Alex Houen
ISBN-10: 0198912285
ISBN-13: 9780198912286
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Language: English
Published: 12/16/2024
Pages: 336
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.50lbs
Size: 9.32h x 6.46w x 0.95d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 03/01/2025
By Alex Houen
By Alex Houen
x
Alex Houen, Professor of Modern Literature and Critical Theory, University of Cambridge

Alex Houen is Professor of Modern Literature and Critical Theory at Cambridge University, and Fellow of Pembroke College. He did a BA (Hons) and then a two-year research MPhil at the University of Sydney before obtaining a PhD at King's College, Cambridge. He taught Modern Literature and American Studies at the University of Sheffield until 2009.

Recently Viewed Products