Innocence and Loss: Representations of War and National Identity in the United States

A fierce national outcry for righteously waging war has long dominated American culture. From at least the wildly popular Spanish-American War and the US military invasion of the Philippines that infuriated Mark Twain, right up to the current Global War on Terrorism, this is a deadly, dark current coursing throughout American history. Meanwhile, dissenting analyses of the "patriotic gore" have until recently been paid scant attention in the popular media. Delving into this history, this probing collection of essays explores ways in which "the compulsive redeployment of innocence" in the launching, cheering, and retelling of America's wars "endlessly defers a national reckoning," as the editors astutely state in their introduction. The works in this collection reflect an effort to add more voices where they are desperately needed.

Introduction: Innocence? Ethics, Cristina Alsina Rísquez & Cynthia Stretch   xi

I. From Battle-Fields to Mounts of Stone: The Failed Promise of National Renewal in Herman Melville’s Battle-Pieces and Clarel, Laura López Peña   1

II. Ellen Glasgow's The Battle-Ground: The New Woman Emerges from the Ashes of the Civil War, Constante González Groba   27

III. Sutton Griggs's Imperium in Imperio and the Spanish-American War: The Battle for Black Constitutional Nationalism, Carme Manuel   49

IV. "Say of them, they are no longer young": The US Left and the Cultural Response to the Spanish Civil War, Víctor Junco   77

V. Enunciations of a War Machine: Crossing The Thin Red Line, Michael Podolny   103

VI. Innocence and Insanity: The Golden Day Episode of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Jochem Riesthuis   121

VII. "The Most Dangerous Enemy of Truth and Freedom": Fahrenheit 451 and the Enforcement of Innocence in Early Cold War America, Mercè Cuenca   135

VIII. Innocents Abroad? Generation Kill in the Three-Block War, Lena-Simone Günther   153

IX. Mourn the Dead. Heal the Wounded. End the War: Women's Contributions to Protest Culture During the Iraq War, Elisabeth Boulot   169

X. "Where have all the soldiers gone?" Ideological Identification and Ethical Responsibility in Contemporary Images of American Postmodern Wars, Cristina Gómez Fernández   193

XI. "Huge protests continue, protests without alone and against alone": Situating Juliana Spahr's Antiwar Poem this connection of everyone with lungs, Nerys Williams   217

XII. Amnesia and the Geographies of Innocence and War, Stipe Grgas   233

Coda: What's at Stake?   247

Youth and War, William V. Spanos   249

The Myth of Innocence in Two Seminal Films About the Vietnam War, David Zeiger   255

The Treasonous Space of Terror, Cary Nelson   259

Loss of Innocence, Cindy Sheehan   267