Andrew Monnickendam - Böcker

Scholars have rarely studied a society's return to peace as a cultural category, as a formative experience common to many lives at any time in history. This collection of original essays by historians and literary critics explores the complex and difficult question of how a culture does, in fact, "return to peace" after a war. Combining analyses of both literary texts and historical sources, the contributors focus on the cultural, political, and personal implications of returning to peace.The volume begins with an introductory essay by its editors, arguing for the need to consider "back to peace" as a significant phenomenon, not just a brief step between war and peace. The first section of the volume, "Return of the Combatant," begins with an essay describing how soldiers in the trenches have imagined what civilian life would be like. This, and the four other essays—on F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, on Japanese POWs, on the return from World War II, and from Vietnam—illustrate how violence, social ostracism, and general bewilderment of soldiers follow them home from war.The five essays in the second section analyze literary texts to reveal the fate of civilians in postwar situations: England and the United States after their respective Civil Wars, Anglo-Indian relations, Germans in postwar Britain, and contemporary Vietnamese American writers. Recurrent themes are clashes of culture, social tensions, and displacement. The four essays in the third section focus on the conflicted nature of the "back to peace" experience in the work of H.D. and Gertrude Stein, in women's writing on the Spanish Civil War, in the stories of war brides, and in the work of Marguerite Duras. These essays demonstrate how literary and historical texts deepen our understanding of the return to peace after war.

This book is a major source for scholars of the latest American poetry. These exciting essays comprise energy and documented discussions on experimentalism, multiculturalism, hyperspace, and gender. Anthologies and little magazines form the matrix for this exploration on conceptual issues surrounding language. The author widens the perspective in which a great deal of writing forced the limits of poetry in this kind of publications. At the same time, he analyzes new contexts and enters into conversation with other sources for inspiration found through other disciplines such as social theory, philosophy, linguistics, and art generated at both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Reflective, taut with alertness, and exploding the postmodern concept of word/object as a liberating experience, this book becomes a driving force to address poetry and challenging political issues with admirable depth.