Friendly fire in the literature of war / Earl R. Anderson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Anderson, Earl R., 1943- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

War in literature.

Friendly fire (Military science).

Physical Description:

222 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Jefferson, North Carolina : McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, [2017]

Summary:

The term "friendly fire" was coined in the 1970s but the theme appears in literature from ancient times to the present. It begins the narrative in Aeschylus's Persians and Larry Heinemann's Paco's Story. It marks the turning point in Homer's Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid, the Chanson de Roland, Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage and Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato. It is the subject of transformative disclosure in Jaan Kross's Czar's Madman, Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July, O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods and A.B. Yehoshua's Friendly Fire. In some stories, events propel the characters into a friendly-fire catastrophe, as in Thomas Taylor's A Piece of this Country and Oliver Stone's 1986 film Platoon. This study examines friendly fire in a broad range of literary contexts. Book jacket.

Contents:

Part I The Mythic Mode

1 Divine Agents of Friendly Fire: Athena and Pan 9

2 Divine Agents of Friendly Fire: Ancient and Modern 22

Part II The Heroic Mode

3 Battlefield Psychology 35

4 Defense of a Narrow Place 46

5 Fragging 62

Part III The Analytic Mode

6 Friendly Fire and Tactics 81

7 Persistent Cultural Frontiers 105

8 War-Elephants on the Cultural Frontier 128

Part IV The Ironic Mode

9 The Banality of Friendly Fire 143

10 War-Cries and Passwords 165

11 Uncanny Disclosure 176.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1476667217

9781476667218

OCLC:

963357919