Portal:War
From WritersBuild
The war novel came of age during the nineteenth century. Works such as Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma, featuring the Battle of Waterloo, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, about the Napoleonic Wars in Russia, and Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, about the American Civil War established the conventions of the modern war novel as it has come down to us today. All of these works feature realistic depictions of major battles, visceral scenes of wartime horrors and atrocities, and significant insights into the nature of heroism, cowardice, and morality in wartime.
An important sub-genre of war fiction included works about war between European settlers and Aboriginal Peoples in North America, seen for instance in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Major John Richardson. In the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the war novel also entered the realm of popular fiction through the adventurous war novels of Ralph Connor, G. A. Henty, and Rudyard Kipling. These latter novelists emphasized the heroic and patriotic aspects of war. They were the last war novelists to write with a blatantly imperialist or romantic mindset, an outlook that became ever-harder to espouse in the wake of the post-industrial wars and genocides of the twentieth century.
