War and Literature

268 Pages·2014·2.48 MB·English

by  Laura Ashe

ESSAYS AND STUDIES 2014
E WAR and
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Y
War was the first subject of literature; at times, war has
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been its only subject. In this volume, the contributors A
N LITERATURE
reflect on the uneasy yet symbiotic relations of war and D

writing, from medieval to modern literature. War writing S
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emerges in multiple forms, celebratory and critical, awed U
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and disgusted; the rhetoric of inexpressibility fights its I
E
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own battle with the urgent necessity of representation,

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record and recognition. This is shown to be true even 0
1 Edited by LAURA ASHE and IAN PATTERSON
to the present day: whether mimetic or metaphorical, 4
literature that concerns itself overtly or covertly with
the real pressures of war continues to speak to issues of
pressing significance, and to provide some clues to the W
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intricate entwinement of war with contemporary life.
A
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Particular topics addressed include writings of and about U
R
the Crusades and battles during the Hundred Years War; R
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Shakespeare’s treatment of war; Auden’s ‘Journal of an A
Airman’; and War and Peace. Sa
Hn
E
IAN PATTERSON is a poet, critic and translator. d
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He teaches English at Queens’ College, Cambridge. n
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LAURA ASHE is Associate Professor of English and a
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A
Tutorial Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. T
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CONTRIBUTORS: Joanna Bellis, Catherine A.M. Clarke, P
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Mary A. Favret, Rachel Galvin, James Purdon, Mark R
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Rawlinson, Susanna A. Throop, Katie L. Walter, Carol TA
Watts, Tom F. Wright, Andrew Zurcher. E
RT
S
Cover: Loyset Liédet and Pol Fruit, ‘The Battle before Roussillon’s OU
Castle’. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, MS Ludwig XIII 6, N
leaf 3. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program. R
(
e
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COVER DESIGN: SIMON LOXLEY s
)
an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB) and
668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 (US)
www.boydellandbrewer.com
Essays and Studies 2014
Series Editor: Elaine Treharne
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Essays and Studies 2014
War and Literature
Edited by
Laura Ashe and Ian Patterson
for the English Association
D. S. BREWER
ESSAYS AND STUDIES 2014
IS VOLUME SIXTY-SEVEN IN THE NEW SERIES
OF ESSAYS AND STUDIES COLLECTED ON BEHALF OF
THE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION
ISSN 0071–1357
© The English Association 2014
All Rights Reserved.
Unauthorised publication contravenes applicable laws
First published 2014
D. S. Brewer, Cambridge
D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
and of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731 USA
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This publication is printed on acid-free paper
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Notes on Contributors viii
Preface xi
i ideologies
Acts of Vengeance, Acts of Love: Crusading Violence in the
Twelfth Century 3
Susanna A. Throop
Peril, Flight and the Sad Man: Medieval Theories of the Body in
Battle 21
Katie L. Walter
‘Is this War?’: British Fictions of Emergency in the Hot Cold War 41
James Purdon
ii interpretations
Crossing the Rubicon: History, Authority and Civil War in
Twelfth-Century England 61
Catherine A. M. Clarke
‘The Reader myghte lamente’: The sieges of Calais (1346) and
Rouen (1418) in chronicle, poem and play 84
Joanna Bellis
Shakespeare’s Casus Belly; or, Cormorant War, and the Wasting
of Men on Shakespeare’s Stage; or, Eating Wars and Digesting
Plays; or, The Art of Chucking Men Into Pits; or, Shakespeare,
Tacitism, and Why Plato Don’t Matter 107
Andrew Zurcher
vi CONTENTS
Unnavigable Kinship in a Time of Conflict: Loyalist
Calligraphies, Sovereign Power and the ‘Muckle Honor’
of Elizabeth Murray Inman 139
Carol Watts
Proclaiming the War News: Richard Caton Woodville and
Herman Melville 163
Tom F. Wright
iii aftermaths
A Feeling for Numbers: Representing the Scale of the War Dead 185
Mary A. Favret
The Guilt of the Noncombatant and W. H. Auden’s ‘Journal of
an Airman’ 205
Rachel Galvin
Does Tolstoy’s War and Peace Make Modern War Literature
Redundant? 228
Mark Rawlinson
Index 249
List of Illustrations
Unnavigable Kinship in a Time of Conflict: Loyalist Calligraphies,
Sovereign Power and the ‘Muckle Honor’ of Elizabeth Murray Inman
Fig. 1: ‘Like a Thunder Clape’: Henry Caner to Deacon Thomas
Foster, London, 10 January 1778. Henry Caner Letterbook,
Bristol University Library. With thanks to Bristol University
Library Special Collections for permission to reproduce the
author’s digital image of the original letterbook. 150
Fig. 2: ‘I have the pleasure’: Elizabeth Murray Inman to ‘dear
friends’, Cambridge, 22 April 1775, Massachusetts Historical
Society: James Murray Robbins Family Papers, page 1. With
thanks to the MHS and The Elizabeth Murray Project website
(www.csulb.edu/projects/elizabethmurray/EM/index.html) for
permission to reproduce sections of this letter. 154
Fig. 3a: ‘Dear Sir’ and Fig. 3b: ‘Dont think Us drunk’: Elizabeth
Murray Inman to ‘dear friends’, Cambridge, 22 April 1775,
Massachusetts Historical Society: James Murray Robbins
Family Papers, pages 3, 4. With thanks to the MHS and The
Elizabeth Murray Project website (www.csulb.edu/projects/
elizabethmurray/EM/index.html) for permission to reproduce
sections of this letter. 156
Proclaiming the War News: Richard Caton Woodville and Herman Melville
Fig. 1: Richard Caton Woodville, War News From Mexico
(1848). Oil on canvas, 27 × 25 in. (68.6 × 63.5 cm). Crystal
Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas.
Photo © The Walters Art Museum, Susan Tobin. 162
Notes on Contributors
Laura Ashe is Associate Professor in English and a tutorial fellow of
Worcester College, Oxford. She is the author of Fiction and History
in England, 1066–1200 (2007) and co-editor of The Exploitations of
Medieval Romance (2010). She is now writing the new Oxford English
Literary History vol. 1: 1000–1350.
Joanna Bellis is the Harry F. Guggenheim Research Fellow at Pembroke
College, Cambridge, working on war literature from the fourteenth to
the sixteenth centuries. Her current projects include a critical edition
of John Page’s eyewitness poem The Siege of Rouen, and a monograph on
accounts of the Hundred Years War in medieval and early modern liter-
ature, provisionally entitled The Word in the Sword: Writing the Hundred
Years War, 1337–1600.
Catherine Clarke is Professor of English at the University of
Southampton. A specialist in medieval literature and culture, her pub-
lications include the monographs Literary Landscapes and the Idea of
England, 700–1400 (2006) and Writing Power in Anglo-Saxon England:
Texts, Hierarchies, Economies (2012). She has a particular interest in
depictions of civil war in earlier medieval England, especially in the
context of the twelfth-century ‘Anarchy’.
Mary A. Favret is Professor of English and Gender Studies at Indiana
University. Her most recent book is War at a Distance: Romanticism and
the Making of Modern Wartime (2010). Her scholarly interests currently
include reading as a visual practice, the affective force of numbers, and
the novels of Jane Austen.
Rachel Galvin is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns
Hopkins University, and holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from
Princeton University. She is currently writing a book titled Poetry
and the Press in Wartime and co-editing a volume of essays, Auden at
Work, with Bonnie Costello. Galvin is the author of a book of poems,
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix
Pulleys & Locomotion (2009), and the translator of Hitting the Streets by
Raymond Queneau (2013).
Ian Patterson is a Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Queens’
College, Cambridge. He is the author of Guernica and Total War (2007)
and translator of Proust’s Finding Time Again (2004). He has published
on war and pacifism and is now working on a new assessment of writing
and left-wing politics between 1929 and 1950, and writing an analy-
sis of contemporary literary culture through a hostile critique of Ian
McEwan’s work.
James Purdon is a Research Fellow in English at Jesus College,
Cambridge. His published work includes articles on Joseph Conrad,
on espionage fiction, and on the British cultural response to national
electrification. He is currently preparing a book about state information
systems and modernist narrative.
Mark Rawlinson is Reader in English at the University of Leicester. He
has published extensively on the cultures of modern warfare, including
British Writing of the Second World War (2000). Current work includes
editing a series of anthologies of war plays for Methuen, writing a book
of literary criticism provisionally titled The Future of First World War
Poetry, and finishing a book on narratives of the Second World War
after 1945.
Susanna A. Throop is Assistant Professor of History at Ursinus
College. A cultural historian of the crusading movement in twelfth-
and thirteenth-century Europe, she is the author of Crusading as an
Act of Vengeance, 1095–1216 (2011) and co-editor with Paul Hyams
of Vengeance in the Middle Ages: Emotion, Religion and Feud (2010). She
is currently co-editing The Crusades and Visual Culture with Elizabeth
Lapina, Laura J. Whatley, and April J. Morris.
Katie Walter is Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at the University
of Sussex. She is the editor of Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and
Culture (2013), and (with Mary C. Flannery) The Culture of Inquisition
in Medieval England (2013), and has a forthcoming monograph on the
mouth in medieval traditions.
Carol Watts is Professor of Literature and Poetics in the Department
of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. Her