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(Re)Writing War in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Beyond Post-Memory book cover

1st Edition

(Re)Writing War in Contemporary Literature and Culture Beyond Post-Memory

Edited By Cristina Pividori, David Owen Copyright 2024
    294 Pages
    by Routledge

    Beyond Post Memory is an exploration of war narratives through the lens of postmemory, offering a critical re-evaluation of how contemporary literature and cultural products reshape our understanding of past conflicts. This volume presents a rich tapestry of perspectives, drawing from an array of conflicts and incorporating insights from international experts across various disciplines, including contemporary literature, film studies, visual arts, and cultural studies. It critically builds upon and extends Marianne Hirsch's concept of postmemory, engaging with complex themes like the ethical dimensions of war writing, the authenticity of representations, and the creative power of art in reimagining traumatic events. This study not only challenges traditional boundaries in war literature and memory studies but also resonates with contemporary concerns about societal engagement with violent pasts, making it a significant addition to scholarly discourse and essential reading for those interested in the intersection of history, memory, and literature.

    List of Contributors

     

     

    Preface- Andrew Monnickendam

     

    Introduction- David Owen and Cristina Pividori

     

    PART-1 Post-Memorial Engagements

    1. Peace Walls and No-Go Zones: A Portrait of a Generation Caught in Between in Stacey Gregg’s Shibboleth -María Gaviña Costero

     

    1. Postmemorial Work and the Creative Reconstruction of Identity in Nora Krug’s Belonging-

     María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro

     

    1. Moi, Rene Tardi, Prisonnier de Guerre Au Stalag IIB: Postmemory and Anachronistic Narration in Tardi’s Graphic Post-Memoir -Umberto Rossi

     

    1.  “Too Weary to Weep.” Women and Children in Female Nigerian War Literature -Paula García-Ramírez

     

    1.  If I Were Dead “It would sell like hotcakes!”: Who Gets to Publish Their Holocaust Diary? -Ravenel Richardson

     

    1. The Silences of War in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun- Thomas Jay Lynn

     

    1. “Before the outbreak of what used to be known as the Great War:” Ironic Nostalgia in Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party (1980) -Cristina Pividori

     

    1. The Limits(?) of the Postmemory Family Story: The Case of Peter Balakian’s Black Dog of Fate- Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż

     

    1. Algerian Families, Imperial Loyalties, and the Memory of the First World in Le Temps de la douleur by Bahia Kiared -Anna Branach-Kallas

     

    1. Charting the Unwritten: Revisiting Shared Historical Trauma in Novels by Ruta Sepetys and Günter Grass -Eugenijus Žmuida

     

    PART-II The Aesthetics of War

    1. 1. “In the box they see / young bodies hearsed.”  (Imaginary) Visions of War in the Poetics of Iain Crichton Smith-Stéphanie Noirard

     

    1. Steven Berkoff’s Sink the Belgrano: Trapped Between an ‘Anti-Maggie’ Stance and Thatcherite Embodiment- Andrea Roxana Bellot
    2. When the Strip Teases: Humour, Sexism, and the Myth of the US Army in Will Eisner’s War Comics- Nicola Paladin

     

    1. Mythic History and Memory: The Making of an Assassin in Jo Nesbø’s The Redbreast -Phyllis Lassner

     

    1. The Representation of the Spanish Civil War in Contemporary British Fiction: The Cases of C.J. Sansom and Kate Lord Brown - Alberto Lázaro

     

    1.  “Your Cause is Just a Cause Too:” Ireland’s Suppressed Great War Stories in Mary O'Donnell's "Fortune on a Fair Day"-Antía Román-Sotelo

     

    1. Silence, Discontinuity of Narrative, and Non-Remembrance in Christine Dwyer Hickey’s Last Train from Liguria – David Owen

     

    1. Cold War Romanian Tempo-Localities as the Legacy of World War Two in Patrick McGuiness’s The Last Hundred Days and Paul Bailey’s Kitty and Virgil -Ágnes Harasztos

     

    1. A Postmemorial Aesthetics of Contemporary Haunting: The Architectural uncanny in Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room- Christina Howes

     

    1. “People’s pasts, you know, being so much more interesting than their futures:” The Ethics of Telling the War Backwards in Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch – Katia Marcellin

     

    1. Detecting the Past: Engaging with the Nazi Past Via Contemporary Crime Novels- Christine Berberich

     

    1. World War Two and The Cold War as Counterfactual Fiction- Kornelije Kvas

     

     

    Beyond Postmemory: A Conversation- Kate McLoughlin, Rachel Seiffert and Jay Winter

     

    Index

    Biography

    Cristina Pividori is Associate Professor of English Literature at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her main research interest is war representation, particularly the aesthetic and ethical challenges inherent in the rendering of the major conflicts of recent times. She has published broadly in these areas. She is also the co-editor of Writings of Persuasion and Dissonance in The Great War. That Better Whiles May Follow Worse (2016) and The Spectre of Defeat: Experience, Memory and Post-Memory (2021).

    David Owen is Associate Professor of English Literature at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. His research interests focus mainly on English novelistic fiction of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Particularly, he is interested in the history of the English Novel, its origins and development, and—within that—the formal and artistic properties of the epistolary novel as it affected and was affected by socio-political changes in fiction writing and reading. In terms of individual writers, his research is principally concerned with the works of the English novelist, Jane Austen. He has published broadly in these ambits. He is also the co-editor of Writings of Persuasion and Dissonance in The Great War. That Better Whiles May Follow Worse (2016) and The Spectre of Defeat: Experience, Memory and Post-Memory (2021).

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