War novel
It is a novel in which the primary action takes place on a battlefield, or in a civilian setting (or home front), where the characters are preoccupied with the preparations for, suffering the effects of, or recovering from war.
The war novel's origins are in the epic poetry of the classical and medieval periods, especially Homer's The Iliad, Virgil's The Aeneid, sagas like the Old English Beowulf, and Arthurian literature.
An example of one such work is Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen's Simplicius Simplicissimus, a semi-autobiographical account of the Thirty Years' War.
All of these works feature realistic depictions of major battles, scenes of wartime horror and atrocities, and significant insights into the nature of heroism and cowardice, as well as the exploration of moral questions.
Barbusse's novel, with its open criticism of nationalist dogma and military incompetence, initiated the anti-war movement in literature that flourished after the war.
Distinctly different from novels like Barbusse's and later Erich Maria Remarque's Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front), Jünger instead writes of the war as a valiant hero who embraced combat and brotherhood in spite of the horror.
One example of this type of novel is Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925)', in which a key subplot concerns the tortuous descent of a young veteran, Septimus Warren Smith, toward insanity and suicide.
In 1929, Erich Maria Remarque's Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) was a massive, worldwide bestseller, not least for its brutally realistic account of the horrors of trench warfare from the perspective of a German infantryman.
Jean-Paul Sartre's novel Troubled Sleep (1949) (originally translated as Iron in the Soul), the third part in the trilogy Les chemins de la liberté, The Roads to Freedom, "depicts the fall of France in 1940, and the anguished feelings of a group of Frenchmen whose pre-war apathy gives way to a consciousness of the dignity of individual resistance - to the German occupation and to fate in general - and solidarity with people similarly oppressed.
"[2] The previous volume Le sursis (1945, The Reprieve, explores the ramifications of the appeasement pact that Great Britain and France signed with Nazi Germany in 1938.
Another significant French war novel was Pierre Boulle's Le Pont de la rivière Kwaï (1952) (The Bridge over the River Kwai).
[4] "The finest of all those novels is the one in which his own brief experience of warfare is used to tremendous effect: La Route Des Flandres (The Flanders Road, 1960) [...] There, war becomes a metaphor all too suitable for the human condition in general, as the forms and protocols of the social order dissolve into murderous chaos.
British novelist Evelyn Waugh's Put Out More Flags (1942) is set during the "Phoney War", following the wartime activities of characters introduced in his earlier satirical novels, and Finnish novelist Väinö Linna's The Unknown Soldier (1954) set during the Continuation War between Finland and the Soviet Union telling the viewpoint of ordinary Finnish soldiers.
"[14] There are, however, some isolated passages that deal with the bombings of London:[15] More experimental and unconventional American works in the post-war period included Joseph Heller's satirical Catch-22 and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, an early example of postmodernism.
Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions, and James Jones' The Thin Red Line, all explore the personal nature of war within the context of intense combat.
One is the Holocaust novel, of which Canadian A.M. Klein's The Second Scroll, Italian Primo Levi's If This Is a Man and If Not Now, When?, and American William Styron's Sophie's Choice are key examples.
Similarly, the life story of a Ukrainian boy who is at first interned in a labour camp and then drafted to fight for Russia is depicted in UKRAINE - In the Time of War, by Sonia Campbell-Gillies.
The American novelist's Richard Hooker's MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors is a black comedy set in Korea during the war; it was made into a movie and a successful television series.
Ian McEwan's novels Black Dogs and Atonement take a similarly retrospective approach to World War II, including such events as the British retreat from Dunkirk in 1940 and the Nazi invasion of France.
