WAR LITERATURE ON CHILDREN AND CHILDREN

War literature on children and Children

War literature on children and Children

Introduction

From the time of the Iliad, warfare has been one of the key literary themes of Western culture. American war literature on children both reflects and challenges American attitudes toward war, nationality, violence, and gender, particularly manhood. Despite war's importance as a literary subject, very little literature about war has endured from the first hundred years after the American Revolution. Americans did not even begin to establish a distinctive literary culture until the decades before the Civil War (Wilson, 2008).

American war literature on children has, in large part, reflected the Romantic resistance to the machine age, extending the tradition of such writers as Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. The major writers of this time period, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Henry James, were more interested in themes of guilt and innocence, exploring the various forms of violence between members of a society rather than violence resulting from armed conflicts (Lewis, 2007).

By the end of the 19th century, this emphasis had begun to change, partly as a result of the disappearance of the frontier, the greater involvement of the United States in foreign wars, and the rise of the military as a separate establishment. Important works that exemplify this shift include Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Herman Melville's Billy Budd (written c. 1888, published 1924), and Ambrose Bierce's Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891).

Since 1895, when Crane proved that military experience was not a prerequisite for writing successfully about war, the theme of warfare has drawn the attention of major novelists to the extent that, one might argue, it has become a literary rite of passage (Gilman, 2006). Since the 1950s, the subject of war has attracted novelists not only as a permanent feature of technological society but also as a powerful metaphor for life in the 20th century.

Discussion

American literary traditions had yet to be established at the time of the Revolutionary War, and very little poetry about that war is considered to have enduring value, until Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote the “Concord Hymn” (1837) with its famous “shot heard round the world” line. This poem was sung on July 4 of that year at the completion of a monument commemorating the battles of Lexington and Concord. It celebrates the nation's first citizen-soldiers, the “embattled farmers,” in a spiritual light that recalls Cooper's ideal of selfless patriotism: “Spirit, that made those heroes dare/To die, and leave their children free,/Bid Time and Nature gently spare/The shaft we raise to them and thee” (Aichinger, 2005).

). Other poems of and about the Revolutionary War are Phillis Wheatley's “To His Excellency General Washington,” Paul Laurence Dunbar's “Black Samson of Brandywine,” and Philip Freneau's “The British Prison Ship” and “To the Memory of the Brave Americans.”

Vietnam writers also convey the many aspects of Vietnam that had the capacity to “spook” soldiers or to push tensions ...