Veteran Poetics

Book at Lunchtime: Veteran Poetics: British Literature in the Age
of Mass Warfare, 1790–2015 In this first full-length study of the
war veteran in literature, Kate McLoughlin draws new critical
attention to a figure central to national life. Offering fresh
readings of canonical and non-canonical works, she shows how
authors from William Wordsworth to J. K. Rowling have deployed
veterans to explore questions that are simultaneously personal,
political, and philosophical: What does a community owe to those
who serve it? What can be recovered from the past? Do people stay
the same over time? Are there right times of life at which to do
certain things? Is there value in experience? How can wisdom be
shared? Veteran Poetics features veterans who travel in time, cause
havoc with their reappearances, solve murders, refuse to stop
talking about the wars they have been in, and refuse to say a word
about them. Through this last trait, they also prompt consideration
of possible critical responses to silence.