Grief in Wartime Private Pain, Public Discourse

An examination of the interface between private narratives of loss and grief in wartime and publicly accepted and legitimized forms of grieving and mourning. Considering the implications of using gender as an analytic category in examining cultural narratives of loss in wartime, the author looks at men's and women's experiences of war both 'at home' and 'at the front'. The analysis spans the two World Wars to the Vietnam War and the recent war in Iraq, and draws on a wide range of auto/biographical sources from diaries and poetry to weblogs.

Carol Acton is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at St. Jerome's University, Waterloo, Canada.

PART I: LOSS AND GRIEF AT HOME * Women Must Weep: Consolation and the Construction of Death in Women's First World War Narratives * Grieving the 'Good' War * Vietnam: War at Home * Iraq in America * PART II: BEREAVEMENT AND MOURNING AT THE 'FRONT' * 'No One Sings Lully, Lully for the Mate Whose Blood Runs Down': Masculinity and Mourning in Combatant War Writing * Women on the War Front * Bringing Home the Front: Vietnam * Transfer Tubes and Other Stories: War in Iraq PART I: LOSS AND GRIEF AT HOME * Women Must Weep: Consolation and the Construction of Death in Women's First World War Narratives * Grieving the 'Good' War * Vietnam: War at Home * Iraq in America * PART II: BEREAVEMENT AND MOURNING AT THE 'FRONT' * 'No One Sings Lully, Lully for the Mate Whose Blood Runs Down': Masculinity and Mourning in Combatant War Writing * Women on the War Front * Bringing Home the Front: Vietnam * Transfer Tubes and Other Stories: War in Iraq