Narrating War.

One of the most significant aspects of the recent historiography on war is the attention dedicated to the genesis of war's cultural image. In the last twenty years the representation of war in literature and the arts, in collective rituals and the media, has been central to much research. These studies recognize that the various means of communication constructing and disseminating the image of a conflict - from painting to cinema, novels to monuments, political rhetoric to religious preaching - help to shape a general narrative about war. What are the motives and what is the ultimate point of fighting and (above all) dying in war? How to legitimate the sacrifice needed for victory (or even for defeat)? Why, and on what terms, must the subject, the faithful Christian, the citizen risk their lives on the battlefield, if the pope, or the king or the atria require them to? The narration of conflict feeds on literary and visual archetypes with century-long roots. A German postcard of the First World War represents the brave fallen soldier, watched over by his faithful steed, following iconographic codes similar to those in Renaissance painting; the 1940s British aviator is the heir of a long tradition of heroic epic harking back to medieval chivalric romance. This volume represents a discussion between leading North American and European scholars of different disciplines (from social history to the history of art) and of two crucial periods in the history of war, the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. Without neglecting the reality of conflict and its dramatic effects on civilian populations, they explore the changing Western narratives and discourses of war.