Chapter 12 - War and Civilians

Summary

This chapter deals with the concept of the civilian as it manifests in the study of war writing from the early twentieth century onwards. The category of the civilian has particular significance for the development of war literature studies, as both the figure which provides a foil to the hegemonic combatant, and as the repressed or forgotten ‘other’ in constructions of revisionist, non-patriarchal histories and canons. That this is not initially obvious has much to do with the persistent privileging of the combatant subject as a source of, and relay of, testimony about the reality of war. War literature studies, in focusing on the twentieth-century combatant (with the Great War infantryman the default paradigm case), has reproduced explicit and tacit constructions of the civilian. Explicitly, in the rhetoric of protest, civilians as referents of war literature are outsiders, ignorant of war; implicitly, civilians are the audience of war writing.