Scholars have rarely studied a society’s return to peace as a cultural category, as a formative experience common to many lives at any time in history. This collection of original essays by historians and literary critics explores the complex and difficult question of how a culture does, in fact, “return to peace” after a war. Combining analyses of both literary texts and historical sources, the contributors focus on the cultural, political, and personal implications of returning to peace.
The volume begins with an introductory essay by its editors, arguing for the need to consider “back to peace” as a significant phenomenon, not just a brief step between war and peace. The first section of the volume, “Return of the Combatant,” begins with an essay describing how soldiers in the trenches have imagined what civilian life would be like. This, and the four other essays—on F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, on Japanese POWs, on the return from World War II, and from Vietnam—illustrate how violence, social ostracism, and general bewilderment of soldiers follow them home from war.
The five essays in the second section analyze literary texts to reveal the fate of civilians in postwar situations: England and the United States after their respective Civil Wars, Anglo-Indian relations, Germans in postwar Britain, and contemporary Vietnamese American writers. Recurrent themes are clashes of culture, social tensions, and displacement. The four essays in the third section focus on the conflicted nature of the “back to peace” experience in the work of H.D. and Gertrude Stein, in women’s writing on the Spanish Civil War, in the stories of war brides, and in the work of Marguerite Duras. These essays demonstrate how literary and historical texts deepen our understanding of the return to peace after war.
Aránzazu Usandizaga and Andrew Monnickendam are professors of American and English literature, respectively, at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. They are coeditors of Dressing Up for War: Transformations of Gender and Genre in the Discourse and Literature of War.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Problematic Return to Peace Aranzazu Usandizaga Andrew Monnickendam 1 Return of the Combatant Anticipating Commemoration: The Post-World War I Era as British Poets Imagined It Brian Dillon 19 The War Veteran in Tender Is the Night William Blazek 38 Coming Home Defeated: Soldiers and the Transition from War to Peace in Post-World War II Japan Beatrice Trefalt 59 "Battle Dress to Sports Suit; Overalls to Frocks": American and British Veterans Confront Demobilization, 1945-51 Mary Anne Schofield 77 "When All the Wars Are Over": The Utopian Impulses of Toni Morrison's Postwar Fiction Jennifer Terry 95 Reconciliation Searching for Peace: John Dryden's Troilus and Cressida or Truth Found too Late Janet Dawson 119 Romances of Reconstruction: The Postwar Marriage Plot in Rebecca Harding Davis and John William De Forest Don Dingledine 146 The Unpleasantness at the Chandrapore Club, and the Mayapore Club, and the Jummapur Club: Forster, Scott, and Stoppard and the End of Empire Laurie Kaplan 160 Community and Harmony in Charlotte Eilenberg's Post-Holocaust Play The Lucky Ones Claire Tylee 180 Vietnamese Exile Writers: Displacement, Identity, the Past, and the Future Renny Christopher 196 Wars Within Peace Seeing the War through Cut-off Triangles: H.D. and Gertrude Stein Kathy J. Phillips 217 The Forgotten Brigade: Foreign Women Writers and the End of the Spanish Civil War Aranzazu Usandizaga 230 Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye: Representations of War Brides in Canadian Fiction and Drama by Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Norah Harding, Margaret Hollingsworth, Joyce Marshall, Suzette Mayr, Aritha van Herk, and Rachel Wyatt Donna Coates 250 Ta(l)king War into Peace: Marguerite Duras's La douleur, History and Her Stories Camila Loew 272 Contributors 292 Index 297
