Visualizing Wartime: A Literary Genealogy

The wars of our time saturate our everyday visual fields in unprecedented ways. This chapter traces the conjoining of human rights, technology, and media activism in confronting the ubiquity of contemporary wars and argues for their impact on the novelistic imagination. It also excavates a literary genealogy of wartime from the Napoleonic era to the present and illuminates the aesthetic purchase of war (and its technologies) as a shaper of distinct literary imaginaries: the sentimental, the humanitarian, the panoptic, and the spectacular.