Bodily Pain, Combat, and the Politics of Memoirs: Between the American Civil War and the War in Vietnam.
This article analyses the languages of wartime pain as seen in British and American memoirs from the American Civil War to the present. How did the rhetoric of wounding in these war memoirs change over time? One of the central shifts lies in the way that wounded men presented themselves as stoic in spite of severe wounding. From 1939, and in an even more dramatic fashion by the war in Vietnam, physical suffering remained a test of manliness, but the tone was defiant and aggressive rather than stoic or resigned. The article also looks at the role of individual publishers and the introduction of psychological dimensions of wounding in latter memoirs.
Joanna Bourke is professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London.
Joanna
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Bourke