Description
Book SynopsisOffers a wide-ranging exploration of armed conflict as depicted in art that illustrates the constant presence of war in our everyday lives. Philip Beidler investigates the assimilation and pervasive presence of the idea of war in popular culture, the impulses behind the making of art out of war, and the debatably aimless trajectories of war itself.
Trade ReviewIn his 'Conclusion', Beidler writes that wars now seem endless and art will always be made from them, but someone else will have to explain it. He has had enough. He is through. Goodbye to all that. To which I can only say: Thank you for your service." -
The Tuscaloosa News"Beidler offers us a dazzling array of case studies that, when taken together, convey the seemingly inexhaustible energy that Western cultures continue to pour into the representations of war via an ever-changing and ever-expanding set of technologies and the protean nature of armed conflict as a locus for collective memory." - Steven Trout, author of
On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919–1941"The subject of war is, of course, an important one, but what separates this book from many others on the subject is its unusual focus on so many forms of art—literature, film, music, visual art, poetry, photography, architecture, sculpture, shrines, memorials, and the museums that contain such—as they reflect on the intense human response that war induces." - Donald Anderson, editor of
War, Literature, and the Arts: An International Journal of the HumanitiesTable of Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: A Dreadful Fascination
- 1. Arms and the Bard: Soldiering in Shakespeare
- 2. Bury Their Hearts at Horseshoe Bend
- 3. Ted Turner et al. at Gettysburg; or, Reenactors in the Attic
- 4. What Lady Butler Knew
- 5. Qingdao and the Archaeologies of War
- 6. Ralph Vaughan Williams's Long Journey Out of War
- 7. History and Memory in the Great War Paintings of John Singer Sargent
- 8. The Great Party Crasher: Mrs. Dalloway, The Great Gatsby, and the Cultures of World War I Remembering
- 9. What Kurt Vonnegut Saw in World War II that Made Him Insane (Along with Billy Pilgrim, Rabo Karabekian, Eliot Rosewater, and Others)
- 10. Script by Stephen Crane, Novel by John Huston, Movie by MGM
- 11. In the Museo de la Revolucíon; or, The Ghost of José Martí
- 12. By the Numbers: Americans, Vietnamese, and the Figures of Sacrifice
- Conclusion: The Forever Wars
- Notes on Sources and Further Reading
- Index
