America has displayed
much difficulty over the years recognizing itself as
a warrior nation. Yet from the Pequot War of 1637 to
the War in Iraq which began in 2003, its emerging sense
of nationhood has developed around the fighting of,
preparation for, or memory of war. War narratives have
been used to sell American products, to define American
manhood, to reinforce American notions of community,
to bolster American religious faith, to justify American
sports programs, and, of course, to support the expansion
of the American military establishment.
War Narratives and American Culture focuses
on how literary, visual, dramatic, and other representations
of armed conflict have, from the seventeenth century
to the present, become occasions for re-imagining America’s
meaning for itself and its place in the world. As such,
the essays in this volume contribute to the recent “internationalization”
or “globalization” of American Studies
by directing attention to specific moments of conflict,
from the colonial period to the twenty-first century,
when war has contributed to, if not dominated, the definition
of the American imaginary. At the same time, the essays
included here reflect the special importance of war
to the interpretive gestures of American Studies itself,
a discipline crucially shaped in the decades spanning
WWII and the Vietnam War and long invested in arguments
about violence in the name of national interests and
their regeneration.
Essay contributors include: Eileen Boris, James Dawes,
Giles Gunn, Katherine Kinney, Curtis Marez, Jorge Mariscal,
John Carlos Rowe, Shirley Samuels, Shelley Streeby,
J. E. Talbott, and Elisa Tamarkin.
Giles Gunn is Professor of English and of Global and
International Studies at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. Carl Gutiérrez-Jones is Professor
of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
