Colossus Computer, Bletchley Park (Wikimedia Commons)
Dr. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young has contributed a chapter “War and Media Studies” to the new Cambridge UP companion on War and Literary Studies.
The volume addresses two main questions: First, how has war shaped the field of literary studies? And second, when scholars today study the literature of war, what are the key concepts in play?
The principal focus of the volume is the relationship between warfare and literary studies as a field of knowledge. What are the key characteristics of the language of war? Of gender in war? Which questions are central to the way we engage with war and trauma, war and sensation, or war and media? In which ways were prominent 20th century theories such as critical theory, French postwar theory, or postcolonial theory shaped by war? How might concepts such as ‘revolution,’ ‘the anthropocene’ or ‘capitalism’ inflect the study of war and literature?
