World War I is widely considered “the Great War” and World War II, “the Good War.” Janis Stout thinks of them as two parts of a whole that continues to engage historians and literary scholars searching for an understanding of both the actual war experiences and the modern culture of grief they embody. In Coming Out of War: Poetry, Grieving, and the Culture of the World Wars Stout argues that poetry, of all the arts, most fully captures and conveys those cultural responses.
While probing the work of such well known war poets as Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and Randall Jarrell, Stout also highlights the impact of the wars on lesser studied, but equally compelling, sources such as the music of Charles Ives and Cole Porter, Aaron Copland and Irving Berlin. She challenges the commonplace belief that war poetry came only from the battlefield and was written only by men by examining the wartime writings of women poets such as Rose Macaulay, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gwendolyn Brooks. She also challenges the assumption that World War II did not produce poetry of distinction by studying the work of John Ciardi, Karl Shapiro, Louis Simpson, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens. While emphasizing aesthetic continuity between the wars, Stout stresses that the poetry that emerged from each displays a greater variety than is usually recognized.
A final chapter considers Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem as a culmination and embodiment of the anti-war tradition in 20th-century poetry and music, and speculates on the reasons why, despite their abundance and eloquence, these expressions of grief and opposition to war have effected so little change.It is in the spirit of the LZ that the essayists in Fourteen Landing Zones approach the writings of the Vietnam War. These fourteen diverse and powerful works by some of today's leading critics in Vietnam studies begin to answer the question of how we will filter the writings of the Vietnam War—including fiction, poetry, drama, and memoirs. What will survive the process of critical acclaim and societal affirmation—and why? Included is an incisive introduction by Jason that provides an overview of the burgeoning body of Vietnam War literature and its peculiar life in the literary and academic marketplace. This strong, often emotional volume will be of particular importance to all those interested in the literature of the Vietnam War, contemporary literature, and contemporary culture and history.
The early 1960s to the mid-1970s was one of the most turbulent periods in American history. The U.S. military was engaged in its longest, costliest overseas conflict, while the home front was torn apart by riots, protests, and social activism. In the midst of these upheavals, an underground and countercultural press emerged, giving activists an extraordinary forum for a range of imaginative expressions. Poetry held a prominent place in this alternative media. The poem was widely viewed by activists as an inherently anti-establishment form of free expression, and poets were often in the vanguards of political activism.
Hearts and Minds is the first book-length study of the poems of the Black Liberation, Women's Liberation, and GI Resistance movements during the Vietnam era. Drawing on recent cultural and literary theories, Bibby investigates the significance of images, tropes, and symbols of human bodies in activist poetry. Many key political slogans of the period––"black is beautiful," "off our backs"––foreground the body. Bibby demonstrates that figurations of bodies marked important sites of social and political struggle.
Although poetry played such an important role in Vietnam-era activism, literary criticism has largely ignored most of this literature. Bibby recuperates the cultural-historical importance of Vietnam-era activist poetry, highlighting both its relevant contexts and revealing how it engaged political and social struggles that continue to motivate contemporary history. Arguing for the need to read cultural history through these "underground" texts, Hearts and Minds offers new grounds for understanding the recent history of American poetry and the role poetry has played as a medium of imaginative political expression.
The Korean War was a major event in American history. It marked an abrupt end to the euphoria Americans felt in the wake of victory in World War II and turned out to be the harbinger of disaster in Vietnam a decade later.
Though three years of brutal fighting resulted in millions of casualties, the final truce line of 1953 corresponded almost exactly to the positions the opponents held when the fighting began. Back home, the returning veterans met with little interest in or appreciation of what they had endured. Consequently, literary responses to the Korean War did not find an eager readership. Few people, it seemed, wanted to read about what they perceived as a backwater war that possessed neither grand scale nor apparent nobility, a war that ended not with a bang, but a whimper.
Yet an important literature has come out of the Korean War. As we mark the fiftieth anniversary of the war, these writings are well worth our attention. Many of the twelve stories and fifty poems assembled in Retrieving Bones have long been out of print and are almost impossible to find in any other source. The editors have enhanced this collection by providing maps, a chronology of the Korean War, and annotated lists of novels, works of nonfiction, and films. In a detailed introduction, Ehrhart and Jason discuss the milestones of the Korean War and place each fiction writer and poet represented into historical and literary contexts.
Among the writers and poets are
· James Lee Burke
· Eugene Burdick
· William Chamberlain
· Rolando Hinojosa
· Reg Saner
· Vern Sneider
· Stanford Whitmore
· Keith Wilson
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