Images of War in the North Atlantic Triangle

This volume addresses representations of war and peace in various media, ranging from literature to film, photography, the visual arts, and music. Underlining the importance of an inter-disciplinary study of images of war and peace, the essays collected in this volume analyse how the choice of medium has contributed to shaping images of war in different historical contexts. Topographically, the focus is on wars in Europe, the United States, and Canada, yet the essays also address the global dimensions of warfare. A first section discusses general considerations regarding the representation of war, including socially and culturally engendered concepts of war, ideological attitudes and issues of language. The following sections concentrate on the American Civil War, with a comparative outlook on the 1930s Civil War in Austria, on representations of war by Canadian artists, and on the two World Wars. Here, a section on the First World War emphasises the iconographic significance of that war as the first industrialized inter-state war in history. Other essays deal with the inter-war period, and with the Cold War and after, when asymmetrical forms of war like the “war on terror” or the militant suppression of groups of the population began to blur conventional boundaries between war and peace.