Writing War: Fiction, Gender, and Memory

The narratives in Writing War displace the soldier as the mouthpiece of war, reminding the reader that the makers of war are not its only victims. These stories assume that women, children, noncombatants, and the enemy have an experience of war as much worth telling and remembering as is the story of any soldier. And the stories insist on the links between men and women at war, men and women in books, and men and women at work, play, home, and in bed. These stories demonstrate how the ideas explored speculatively in the essays on war literature permeate the air we breathe and inform the lives we lead.

Lynne Hanley publishes both short stories and literary criticism. She is professor emerita of literature and writing at Hampshire College.