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1 results

  • Chapter 12 - War and Civilians

  • from Part II - Foundational Concepts
  • Edited by Anders Engberg-Pedersen, University of Southern Denmark, Neil Ramsey, University of New South Wales, Sydney
  • Book:
    War and Literary Studies
    Published online:
    15 January 2023
    Print publication:
    05 January 2023, pp 201-215

  • Summary

    This chapter deals with the concept of the civilian as it manifests in the study of war writing from the early twentieth century onwards. The category of the civilian has particular significance for the development of war literature studies, as both the figure which provides a foil to the hegemonic combatant, and as the repressed or forgotten ‘other’ in constructions of revisionist, non-patriarchal histories and canons. That this is not initially obvious has much to do with the persistent privileging of the combatant subject as a source of, and relay of, testimony about the reality of war. War literature studies, in focusing on the twentieth-century combatant (with the Great War infantryman the default paradigm case), has reproduced explicit and tacit constructions of the civilian. Explicitly, in the rhetoric of protest, civilians as referents of war literature are outsiders, ignorant of war; implicitly, civilians are the audience of war writing.