The article considers some aspects of the problem of both individual and collective identity in the context of the development of different kinds of warfare in modern western society. The elucidation of these relations requires an unexpected application of aesthetic ideas; in particular the notion of the sublime. It is argued that the experience of combat is one possible ‘real’ form of the sublime. It is further suggested, paradoxically, that sublime combat cannot actually be experienced; it is an ‘inexperience’. The historical significance of modern western war literature, thus, is just that it fills the ‘gap’ left by the destructive inexperience of combat and it allows those who endured it, as well as those who did not, to construct a ‘memory’ of the events themselves.
Anderson, Benedict (1983) Imagined Communities. London: Verso .
2.
Antze, Paul and Michael Lambek (eds) (1996) Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory. New York and London: Routledge .
3.
Aron, Raymond (1976) Clausewitz: Philosopher of War. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul .
4.
Ashworth, Tony (1980) Trench Warfare 1914-1918. London: Macmillan .
5.
Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane and Annette Becker (2000) 14-18, Retrouver la guerre. Paris: nrf, Éditions Gallimard .
6.
Barbusse, Henri (1917) Under Fire, trans. Fitzwater Wray. London: J.M. Dent and Sons .
7.
Bauman, Zygmunt (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press .
8.
Beiser, Frederick C. (1987) The Fate of Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press .
9.
Black, Jeremy (ed.) (1999) War in the Early Modern World 1450-1815. London: UCL Press .
10.
Blumenberg, Hans (1983) The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press .
11.
Blunden, Edmund (2000) Undertones of War. Harmondsworth: Penguin .
12.
Bobbitt, Philip (2002) The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History. Harmondsworth: Penguin .
13.
Bourke, Joanna (1999) An Intimate History of Killing. London: Granta .
14.
Braudel, Fernand (1981, 1983, 1984) Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century, 3 vols. London: Collins .
15.
Broadie, Alexander (1997) The Scottish Enlightenment: An Anthology. Edinburgh: Canongate .
16.
Burke, Edmund (1990) A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford University Press .
17.
Carruthers, Mary (1990) The Book of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .
18.
Caruth, Cathy (ed.) (1995) Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press .
19.
Casey, Edward S. (2000) Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press .
20.
Clausewitz, Carl von (1968) On War, trans. J.J. Graham. Harmondsworth: Penguin .
21.
Connerton, Paul (1989) How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .
22.
Contamine, Philippe (ed.) (2000) War and Competition Between States. Oxford: European Science Foundation and Clarendon Press .
23.
Curtin, Philip (2000) The World and the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .
24.
Dahlhaus, Carl (1991) The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press .
25.
Daston, Lorraine and Katharine Park (1998) Wonders and the Order of Nature. New York: Zone .
26.
Delbrück, Hans (1990) The Dawn of Modern Warfare, trans. Walter J. Renfroe Jr. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press .
27.
Downing, Brian M. (1992) The Military Revolution and Political Change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press .
28.
du Picq, Ardant (1987) ‘Battle Studies’, in Roots of Strategy Book 2. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books .
29.
Eksteins, Modris (1989) Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. New York: Doubleday .
30.
Ellenberger, Henri F. (1970) The Discovery of the Unconscious. London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press .
31.
Ellis, John (1990) The Sharp End: The Fighting Man in World War II. London: Pimlico .
32.
Ellis, John (1999) One Day in a Very Long War. London: Pimlico .
33.
Ertman, Thomas (1997) Birth of Leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .
34.
Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychology and History. New York and London: Routledge .
35.
Ferguson, Harvie (1996) The Lure of Dreams: Sigmund Freud and the Construction of Modernity. London: Routledge .
36.
Ferguson, Harvie (2000) Modernity and Subjectivity, Body, Soul, and Spirit. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia .
37.
Findlen, Paula (1999) Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press .
38.
Förster, Stig and Jörg Nagler (1997) On the Road to Total War. Washington, DC and Cambridge: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press .
39.
Foucault, Michel (1975) Discipline and Punish, trans. Allan Sheridan. London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press .
40.
Fussell, Paul (1975) The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press .
41.
Glete, Jan (2002) War and the State in Early Modern Europe. London and New York: Routledge .
42.
Graves, Robert (1998) Good-bye to All That. New York: Anchor .
43.
Gusdorf, Georges (1948) La Découverte de soi. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France .
44.
Gusdorf, Georges (1993) Le Romantisme, 2 vols. Paris: Payot .
45.
Hacking, Ian (1995) Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press .
46.
Hadden, Richard W. (1994) On the Shoulders of Merchants. Albany: State University of New York .
47.
Halbwachs, Maurice (1992) On Collective Memory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press .
48.
Hale, J.R. (1985) War and Society in Renaissance Europe 1450-1620. London: Leicester University Press/Fontana .
49.
Hobbes, Thomas (1962) Leviathan, ed. John Plamenatz . London: Collins .
50.
Hobsbawm, E.J. (1990) Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .
51.
Holmes, Richard (1985) Firing Line. London: Jonathan Cape .
Hynes, Samuel (1998) The Soldiers’ Tale. London: Pimlico .
54.
Janet, Pierre (1965) The Major Symptoms of Hysteria. New York: Hafner .
55.
Janet, Pierre (1977) The Mental State of Hystericals. Washington, DC: University Publications of America .
56.
Jardine, N. , J.A. Secord and E.C. Spary (1996) Cultures of Natural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .
57.
Jones, James (1998) The Thin Red Line. London: Hodder and Stoughton .
58.
Jünger, Ernst (1996) The Storm of Steel. New York: Howard Feretig .
59.
Kant, Immanuel (1960) Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press .
60.
Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta (1993) The Mastery of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press .
61.
Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta (1995) Court, Cloister and City: The Art and Culture of Central Europe. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press .
62.
Keegan, John (1991) The Face of Battle. London: Pimlico .
63.
Koerner, Joseph Leo (1990) Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape. London: Reaktion Books .
64.
Kolko, Gabriel (1994) Century of War: Politics, Conflicts, and Society since 1914. New York: The New Press .
65.
Koselleck, Reinhart (1985) Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press .
66.
Larson, James L. (1994) Interpreting Nature: The Science of Living Form from Linnaeus to Kant. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press .
67.
Leys, Ruth (2000) Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press .
68.
Linderman, Gerald F. (1997) The World within War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press .
69.
Longinus (1965) ‘On the Sublime’, in Aristotle/Horace/Longinus: Classical Literary Criticism, trans. T.S. Dorsch. Harmondsworth: Penguin .
70.
Maalouf, Amin (2000) On Identity, trans. Barbara Bray. London: The Harvill Press .
71.
MacNeil, W.H. (1982) The Pursuit of Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press .
72.
Mailer, Norman (1993) The Naked and the Dead. London: Flamingo .
73.
Maravall, José Antonio (1986) Culture of the Baroque, trans. Terry Cochran. Manchester: Manchester University Press .
74.
Marin, Louis (1999) Sublime Poussin, trans. Catherine Porter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press .
75.
Mitchell, Timothy F. (1993) Art and Science in German Landscape Painting 1770-1840. Oxford: Clarendon Press .
76.
Mosse, George L. (1990) Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press .
77.
Neubauer, John (1986) The Emancipation of Music from Language. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press .
78.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1995) Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard T. Gray. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press .
79.
Nora, Pierre (ed.) (1992-6) Realms of Memory, 3 vols, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press .
80.
Otto, Rudolf (1959) The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey. Harmondsworth: Penguin .
81.
Parker, Geoffrey (1996) The Military Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .
82.
Piñero, José M. López (1988) Historical Origins of the Concept of Neurosis, trans. D.D. Berrois. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .
83.
Pomian, Krzysztof (1987) Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Vienna, 1500-1800, trans. Elizabeth Wiles-Portier. Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press .
84.
Remarque, Erich Maria (1963) All Quiet on the Western Front, trans. A.W. Wheen. St Albans: Granada .
85.
Ribot, Théodule (1882) Diseases of Memory. New York: Appleton .
86.
Rieuneau, Maurice (1974) Guerre et révolution: dans le roman francais de 1919 à 1939. Lyons: Klincksieck .
87.
Roberts, M. (1967) Essays in Swedish History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press .
Rosen, Charles (1996) The Romantic Generation. London: Harper Collins .
90.
Samuel, Raphael (1994) Theatres of Memory. London and New York: Verso .
91.
Sassoon, Siegfried (2000) Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. London: Faber and Faber .
92.
Shepherd, Ben (2000) A War of Nerves. London: Jonathan Cape .
93.
Stoichita, Victor I. (1995) Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art. London: Reaktion Books .
94.
Stoichita, Victor I. (1997) A Short History of the Shadow. London: Reaktion Books .
95.
Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (1975) Knowledge and Politics. New York: The Free Press .
96.
van den Leeuw, G. (1963) Religion in Essence and Manifestation, trans. J.E. Turner. New York: Harper and Row .
97.
van der Kolk , Bessel, Alexander McFarlane and Lars Weisaeth (1996) Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society. New York and London: Guilford Press .
98.
Wallerstein, Immanuel (1974, 1980) The Modern World-system, 2 vols. New York: Academic Press .
99.
Winter, Jay (1995) Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .
100.
Winter, Jay and Emmanuel Sivan (eds) (2000) War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .
101.
Yates, Frances A. (1969) The Art of Memory. Harmondsworth: Penguin .
102.
Young, Allan (1995) The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press .
