Introduction -- "Stick to Her Farms and Farmer Folk": World War I and the Origins of Combat Gnosticism -- "Tell It Like It Was": World War II and the Institutional Curation of Memory -- "You Had to Be There": Vietnam and the Veteran's Consolidation of Authority -- "You Don't Have to Be a Veteran": The All-Volunteer Force and the Dispersion of Authority -- "The New Battle": The Civil-Military Gap and the Shock of Coming Home -- "The Other Side of COIN": Counterinsurgency and the Ethics of Memory -- "You Volunteered to Get Screwed": Public Trust and the Literary Representation of the Professional Military -- Appendix: The American Novels of Iraq and Afghanistan through 2020.
Summary:
"Who writes novels about war? For nearly a century after World War I, the answer was simple: soldiers who had been there. The assumption that a person must have experienced war in the flesh in order to write about it in fiction was taken for granted by writers, reviewers, critics, and even scholars. Contemporary American fiction tells a different story. Less than half of the authors of contemporary war novels are veterans. And that's hardly the only change. Today's war novelists focus on the psychological and moral challenges of soldiers coming home rather than the physical danger of combat overseas. They also imagine the consequences of the wars from non-American perspectives in a way that defies the genre's conventions. To understand why these changes have occurred, David Eisler argues that we must go back nearly fifty years, to the political decision to abolish the draft. The ramifications rippled into the field of cultural production, transforming the foundational characteristics- authorship, content, and form-of the American war fiction genre"-- Provided by publisher.
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