title: Writing War: Fiction, Gender, and Memory
author: Lynne T. Hanley
description: "Unusual as it is powerful, this study consists of linked essays interspersed by short stories, all based on the general theme of women and war. Hanley (Hampshire College) begins by taking issue with Paul Fussell's important work, <i>The Great War and Modern Memory</i> (1975), calling it a narrow analysis of war literature, based exclusively on the writings of white English and American men. The author sees Fussell's study deliberately suppressing war texts written by women, especially pernicious in this period of canon formation. As remedy, Hanley critically examines the writings of women who make the matter of war a central part of their evolving thought: Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, and Doris Lessing, in particular. . . . Hanley's short stories, her war literature, cover the impact and aftermath of war. The stories movingly express fear, dislocation, monstrousness. Both essays and stories are accessible, a clear explication of an important feminist critical stance. Highly recommended."<i>Choice</i><br /><br />"Hanley believes that an established 'canon' of war fiction, which sentimentalizes the viewpoint of an individual white male soldier, serves as society's collective memory of war. Since women do not normally write from the battlefield, they have been excluded from the canon. But the front is not only on the battlefieldespecially now, in the nuclear age. In her stories, Hanley tries to create an alternative memory of war, one that includes the views of victims, the 'enemy,' and those who stayed at home, such as women and children."<i>Booklist</i>
zlib_text: >
  
  
  Stella Bain
  
  
  >
  
  
  > Anita Shreve
  
  > Hachette Digital, Inc. (2013)
  
  >
  
  
  * * *
  
  > Rating: ★★★★☆
  
  > Tags: Fiction, Historical, Literary  
  Fictionttt Historicalttt Literaryttt
  
  
  An epic story, set against the backdrop of World War I, from bestselling
  author Anita Shreve.  
  
  
  
   When an American woman, Stella Bain, is found suffering from severe shell
  shock in an exclusive garden in London, surgeon August Bridge and his wife
  selflessly agree to take her in.  
  
  
  
   A gesture of goodwill turns into something more as Bridge quickly develops a
  clinical interest in his houseguest. Stella had been working as a nurse's aide
  near the front, but she can't remember anything prior to four months earlier
  when she was found wounded on a French battlefield.  
  
  
  
   In a narrative that takes us from London to America and back again, Shreve
  has created an engrossing and wrenching tale about love and the meaning of
  memory, set against the haunting backdrop of a war that destroyed an entire
  generation.  
  
  
  
  