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2024 Senators Bob and Elizabeth Dole Biennial Award for Distinguished Book in Veterans Studies, winner
For nearly a century after World War I, there was an assumption that a person—a soldier—must have experienced war in the flesh in order to write about it in fiction. Yet 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 this great shift, 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.
“A very smart, very relevant work. Any scholar of American war fiction would find this study extremely useful.”—Eric Bennett, author, A Big Enough Lie
“David Eisler’s Writing Wars: Authorship and American War Fiction, WWI to Present is a brilliant excavation of the stories Americans have been telling ourselves about war for the past century. Eisler has written a sharp, engaging, and troubling cultural history.”—Phil Klay, National Book Award winner, author, Redeployment
“This brilliant, deeply interdisciplinary study is Eisler's first book, but with it he joins the ranks of Jay Winter, Samuel Hynes, and Paul Fussell. A stunning achievement.”—Choice
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