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Since time immemorial war has been a literary theme on the grand scale. Homer’s
Iliad, which is known as the “world’s greatest war novel,” continues to enthrall
readers today as much as Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War remains
an object of interest for the contemporary citizen who can see in it reflections of many of
the great polemical debates of our own times. Similarly, the battle of Kurukshetra in the
Mahabharata delights both the elite and the common man through its depiction of the
tales of heroism and the political and moral issues it raises. In the 19th century, Victor
Hugo’s Les Miserables and Tolstoy’s War and Peace present unforgettable vision of
mankind caught in the vortex of battles and conflicts. If in the 20th century war provided
writers with tropes and imaginative fictions of enormous vitality, their influence in the
current era has been no less pervasive.
In the context of America, war as a literary theme “acts out the great tragic vision of
our time, the prime historical peripeteia and narrative” (Walsh, 1982, p. 3). The great
avalanche of war novels in America began sometime after 1890 with the publication of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895). The ever-growing interest of
American writers in war themes seems inexplicable because ever since the Civil War
came to an end in 1865 (the destruction of the twin towers notwithstanding), “not a single
shell has exploded on American soil; not one bomb dropped from a hostile plane has
destroyed a single home; America has not groaned under the heel of one foreign soldier’s
boot. Even the tempest of the two World Wars which ravaged Europe did not touch her
territory. There were no ruined cities, no blood-soaked fields, no Auschwitz or Dachau;
no countless war dead, no casualties among old people, women and children” (Koreneva,
1976, p. 48).
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