Sacrifice and Modern War Literature

Alex Houen is a University Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature in the Faculty of English, and Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Terrorism and Modern Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford University Press, 2002), editor of States of War since 9/11: Terrorism, Sovereignty, and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2014), and co-editor (with Dominic Janes) of Martyrdom and Terrorism: Pre-Modern to Contemporary Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2014). He also co-edits (with Adam Piette) the international poetry journal Blackbox Manifold.Jan-Melissa Schramm is a University Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature in the Faculty of English, and Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge. She is the author of Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Censorship, Dramatic Form, and the Representation of the Sacred in Nineteenth-Century England (forthcoming), and co-editor of Fictions of Knowledge: Fact, Evidence, Doubt (Macmillan, 2011).

This rich collection ranges over two hundred years of predominantly British military history and war writing to consider which languages, symbols, and forms of sacrifice have operated to explain, rationalize, or critique war violence ... a clear picture emerges of the contradictions within imperial rhetoric and a stringent critique of British policy from within, even at times by those held to be enthusiasts of empire.

• Introduction 1: Philip Shaw: Wordsworth, Waterloo, and Sacrifice 2: Jan-Melissa Schramm: 'I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy': The Crimean War and the 'Inspiration' of (Self-) Sacrifice in mid-Victorian Fiction 3: Christopher Herbert: The Indian Mutiny and the Blood of Sacrifice 4: Randall Fuller: The Poetics of American Civil War Sacrifice 5: Steve Attridge: Character, Sacrifice, and Scapegoats: Boer War Fiction 6: Vincent Sherry: Bare Death: The Failing Sacrifice of the Great War 7: Tim Kendall: 'Freely Proffered'?: The Deaths of Rupert Brooke and Julian Grenfell 8: Matthew Campbell: 'A bit of shrapnel': The Sigerson Shorters, the Hardys, Yeats and the Easter Rising 9: Ian Patterson: The Penny's Mighty Sacrifice: The Spanish Civil War and Left Poetics 10: Mark Rawlinson: The Motif of Sacrifice in the Literature and Culture of the Second World War 11: Helen Goethals: 'It is the poems you have lost': Poetry and Sacrifice during the Second World War 12: Adam Piette: Sacrifice and the Inner Organs of the Cold War Citizen 13: Philip Beidler: The Vietnam War, American Remembering, and the Measure of Sacrifice, Fifty Years Later 14: David Wheatley: 'Atrocities Against His Sacred Poet': The Orpheus Myth and the Poetry of the Northern Irish Troubles 15: Alex Houen: Reckoning Sacrifice in 'War on Terror' Literature