The volume shows how the gendered conception of war has both shaped literary texts and formed the literary canon. It identifies and interrogates the conventional war text, with its culturally determined split between warlike men and peaceful women, and it confirms that women's role in relation to war is much more complex and complicitous than such essentializing suggests.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction / Helen Cooper, Adrienne Munich, and Susan Squier -- War and memory / June Jordan -- Arms and the woman : The con[tra]ception of the war text / Helen Cooper, Adrienne Munich, and Susan Squier -- "Still wars and lechery" : Shakespeare and the last Trojan woman / Lorraine Helms -- Rewriting history : Madame de Villedieu and the wars of religion / Patricia Francis Cholakian -- Mute fury : Southern women's diaries of Sherman's March to the Sea, 1864-1865 / Jane E. Schultz -- Civil wars and sexual territories / Margaret R. Higonnet -- The women and the men of 1914 / James Longenbach -- Corpus-corps-corpse : writing the body in-at war / Jane Marcus -- May Sinclair's The tree of heaven : the vortex of feminism, the community of war / Laura Stempel Mumford -- Combat envy and survivor guilt : Willa Cather's "Manly battle yarn" / Sharon O'Brien.