As a genre, personal narratives have evolved over two centuries, passing from being almost exclusively memoirs written by high-ranking officers (mostly noble) to consisting of a much more multifaceted variety of expressive forms such as letters, diaries, autobiographical sketches, poems, published or unpublished memoirs, oral histories and autobiographical fiction.
Personal narratives can hardly provide an overall comprehension and depiction of war, as they can inform about events that occurred on a smaller scale and the perception that human beings have of the war as a direct experience. Therefore, working with personal narratives often requires intellectual flexibility and the ability to blend different disciplinary approaches by borrowing diverse methodological, critical and analytical tools.
The CEIWJ devotes its seventh Issue to exploring personal narratives, aiming to grasp the most profound link between war and experience in memory and storytelling.
The entire Issue n. 7 and the single contributions can be downloaded below:
Introduction to Issue n. 7, by the Editors
Michele Baldaro: War and Colony. Empathy and Ambivalence in the Setting of Mario Tobino’s Libya
Lofti Ben Rejeb: “Virtuous Hatred” of Oppressive Institutions: William Ray’s Republican Patriotism in His Account of the American-Tripolitan War (1808)
Martin Danahay: Gendering the “Soldier”: Phallogocentrism and U.S. Military Discourse
Anna Efstathiadou: Damien Parer: “The Gamest Man Alive”
David A. Gerber: A Wartime Encounter That Never Occurred: Moral Injury and Literary Healing
Massimo Lollini: From the Trenches to the Cosmos: The Great War Testimonies of Teilhard de Chardin and Ernst Jünger
K. Walton Morse: In Their Own Words: The Van Cortlandts’ Experience of the American Revolution, Political, Military, and Civilian
Polly North: Agency Under Fire
Vedran Obucina: Personal Narratives of the Bosnian War Experiences among the Clergy
Jean-Pierre Scherman: “Contact at Bardia”: The Baptism of Fire of the Men of the 2nd South African Infantry Division, 31 December 1941 – 1 January 1942
Marie-Rose Tshite: Capturing Congolese Women’s Memories of War and Peacemaking
Close Encounters in War 