Writing War, Writing Lives

War affects life writing and lives affect war writing. The traditional forms of life writing—memoir, biography, letters, diaries—buckle under the strain of war. War writing has fewer traditional forms but exists at a similar extreme. The eight chapters in this book, covering a range of genres, and spanning from the early 1800s to the 21^st century, illuminate the creative innovations, improvisations and implosions which happen when the demands of writing war and writing lives collide. Central to all is the question of authenticity: how can wars and lives be known and who can speak of them with authority? This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.

War affects life writing and lives affect war writing. The traditional forms of life writing – memoir, biography, letters, diaries – buckle under the strain of war. War writing has fewer traditional forms but exists at a similar extreme. The eight chapters in this book, written by leading and up-and-coming scholars in the field, illuminate the creative innovations, improvisations, and implosions which happen when the demands of writing war and writing lives collide. Central to all is the question of authenticity: how can wars and lives be known and who can speak of them with authority? This volume has a generous chronological and generic range, beginning in the early 1800s and stretching to twenty-first-century texts, and covering letters, diaries, fiction, ‘fakeries’, poetry, biography, testimony, songs, objects, and digital media. The mix of authors is similarly varied: Thomas Hardy, W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Bowen rub shoulders with Yousif M. Qasmiyeh (a contemporary Palestinian poet), Farah Baker (a Gazan teenager) and the writers behind the pen names Araki Yasusada and Jiri Kajanë. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.