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"N War and Peace (1865-9), Nikolai Rostov responds enthusiastically to a request from Boris Drubetskoy to describe how and where he got his wound: He described the Scho·n Graben affair exactly as men who have taken part in battles always do describe them - that is, as they would like them to have been, as they have heard them described by others, and as sounds well, but not in the least as they really had been. Rostov was a truthful young man and would never have told a deliberate lie. He began his story with the intention of telling everything exactly as it happened, but imperceptibly, unconsciously and inevitably he passed into falsehood. If he had told the truth to his listeners who, like himself, had heard numerous descriptions of cavalry charges and had formed a definite idea of what a charge was like and were expecting a precisely similar account from him, either they would not have believed him or, worse still, would have thought Rostov himself to blame if what generally happens to those who describe cavalry charges had not happened to him"-- "Kate McLoughlin's Authoring War is an ambitious and pioneering study of war writing across all literary genres from earliest times to the present day. Examining a range of cultures, she brings wide reading and close rhetorical analysis to illuminate how writers have met the challenge of representing violence, chaos and loss. War gives rise to problems of epistemology, scale, space, time, language and logic. She emphasises the importance of form to an understanding of war literature and establishes connections across periods and cultures from Homer to the 'War on Terror'. Exciting new critical groupings arise in consequence, as Byron's Don Juan is read alongside Heller's Catch-22 and English Civil War poetry alongside Second World War letters. Innovative in its approach and inventive in its encyclopedic range, Authoring War will be indispensable to any discussion of war representation"-- Introduction: authoring war -- 1. Credentials -- 2. Details -- 3. Zones -- 4. Duration -- 5. Diversions -- 6. Laughter -- Conclusion: to perpetual peace.
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