Like other literary genres in fifth-century Athens, such as tragedy and oratory, ancient historiography responded to the continuous wars of the Greek city-states with an intense literary effort, producing the first prose descriptions of warfare in the western hemisphere. This chapter examines the representation of warfare in fifth-century Athenian literature against an historical background, taking account of Homeric epic as well as of political and normative contexts, in order to clarify textual priorities and narrative strategies. It begins by analyzing representations of extreme conditions: death in battle, often cast as the ultimate test of manhood, and military defeat. It then backs up to look at representations of the course of warfare, analyzing the role of victorious leadership, intelligence, and courage together with the accompanying descriptions of bodily suffering and human error. Finally, the chapter examines representations of the human causes of war: greed, retaliation for insult, and the desire for power, profit, and rule over others. As a short coda, it reflects on the popularity of war as a literary theme, noting the emergence of war fiction with Xenophon’s Cyropaedia.

Taking the First World War as an originary moment of global conflict, the chapter examines how a postcolonial approach opens up war studies in terms of perspective and methodology while asking, at the same time, how a focus on warfare puts pressure on the abstractions of postcolonial theory. What do terms such as ‘war archive’ and the ‘literary’ mean in a context where the majority of the world’s combatants and non-combatants were, till recently, largely non-literate? How does the experience of colonialism trouble the very distinction between ‘war’ and ‘peace’ in global histories and what is the relationship between anti-colonial resistance and postcolonial critique? Is diversity the first step towards decolonisation? The chapter engages with these issues through a focus on the colonial dimensions of the First World War. Combining a reconceptualization of the ‘archive’ with readings of figures such as Rabindranath Tagore, Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, Rudyard Kipling, Mulk Raj Anand and David Diop, it argues that a postcolonial approach goes far beyond challenging the colour of memory or Eurocentric assumptions into deconstructing the ideology of war itself.

The Romantic theory of war described in this chapter is the product of a group of highly educated Prussian officers trying to grasp the new conditions of politics and warfare that emerged in the wake of the French Revolution. They had studied the philosophy of enlightenment, the history of warfare, and the mathematics of probability, they had read the works of the Classical and Romantic poets of their time, and they had fought in the Revolutionary and the Napoleonic wars. In order to define the nature of war, one of the most eminent of these thinkers, Carl von Clausewitz, relied on Immanuel Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Describing the reality of war, he also relied on three new sciences that had played a role in Kant’s philosophy: the science of static and mechanics, the science of electro-magnetism, and the science of population statistics. The chapter argues that while Clausewitz was not a precursor of Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication, one of the most consequential moments of the digital revolution, he does, however, remain relevant to this day as one of the first theorists of irregular warfare.

As C. H. Wang observed in 1975, early Chinese representations of war generally perform an “ellipsis of battle” – readily narrating the causes of a war and its ultimate results, but avoiding detailed accounts of the fighting. The reason for this omission lies in the Mencian doctrine that the true ruler of the world must be “one who does not love killing.” Whether or not actual rulers loved killing, they had to be represented as if they went to war only against their will. Twentieth-century conditions changed the meaning of war in China as elsewhere. Warfare was now done by armies massively mobilized among the population; noncombatants found themselves taking an active part or being massacred; phases of civil war pitted Chinese against Chinese. Poets faced a dilemma: to prioritize the obligations of Chinese citizens in a life-or-death struggle for the survival of the nation, or persist in an individualist stance that the struggle put at risk? Examples of modern poets’ thinking through real and imagined actions of warfare show how twentieth-century Chinese literature demolished longstanding taboos and claimed new thematic territories.

In “Trauma Studies: Hemingway’s Neurological and Corporeal Injuries,” Sarah Anderson Wood examines the way recent developments in trauma studies and increased awareness of mental health issues have enhanced and sometimes reframed Hemingway scholarship about his mental and physical health over the course of his life, but particularly in regard to the author’s rapid decline in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Trauma studies, Wood contends, has informed advances in medical science, in psychiatry, in the historicity of treatment and therapy, and simply in the artistic representation of pain, all of which have impacted scholars’ understandings of Hemingway’s relationship to suffering. Wood also points to studies that are exploring the impact these conditions may have had on his later writing and to the potential of the burgeoning field of epigenetics, which looks at gene expression and not simply genetic coding. She pays particular attention to Andrew Farah’s Hemingway’s Brain and Linda Wagner-Martin’s Hemingway’s Wars: Public and Private Battles (both 2017).

The Introduction defines the main concepts of The Literature of Absolute War (i.e., “absolute war,” “absolute enmity,” “total war,” “traumatic realism,” “catastrophic modernism,” and “spectrum of possibilities”) and comments on some of the extreme challenges posed by absolute war to modern war writing.