Introduction:Three Narratives of Civil War: Recurrence, Remembrance and Reform from Sulla to Syria; David Armitage.- Part I: Narrative through Testimonies.- Telling Stories, Making Selves: Nostalgia, the Lost Cause, and Postbellum Plantation Memoirs and Reminiscences; David Anderson.- Letter to Oneself – Acknowledging Guilt in Post-War Lebanon; Sonja Hegasy.- “Irish History Unidealised”: The Politics of Republican Memoir and Narratives of the Defeated and Defiant; Stephen Hopkins.- Struggling with Memory: Oral History and Conflict Resolution in Belfast Communities; Claire Hackett.- Narrative-making and Recording Trauma – Reflections from Northern Ireland; Katy Radford.- Part II: Narrative through the Arts.- The Truth of Fiction – Some Stories of the Lebanese Civil Wars; Elisa Adami.- Civil Wars and Cinematic Narrative: The Case of Psychi Vathia (Deep Soul, Pantelis Voulgaris, 2009); Eleftheria Rania Kosmidou.- Conflict and Theatre Translation: A Narrative Analysis of Saakki (1987); Dinithi Karunanayake.- Part III: Narrative and Agency.- Revivifying and Reconciling the State: Peacemaking and Narrative Hegemony in Post-Civil-War England, 1646-7; Gary Rivett.- Civil-War Stories in Lands of Commanded Forgetting: Restoration England and Late Twentieth-Century El Salvador; Matthew Neufeld and Rachel Hatcher.- The Syrian War: Irreconcilable Narratives; Stéphane Valter.- Conclusion: Oblivion or History: Two different Ways of Coming out of War; Ninon Grangé.- Index
Karine Deslandes is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Buckingham, UK, and Head of the Department of Foreign Modern Languages.
Fabrice Mourlon is Senior Lecturer at Université Paris 13-Sorbonne Paris Cité, France.
Bruno Tribout is Senior Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, UK.
This book explores the representation of intra-state conflicts. It offers a distinctive approach by looking at narrative forms and strategies associated with civil war testimony, historiography and memory. The volume seeks to reflect current research in civil war in a number of disciplines and covers a range of geographical areas, from the advent of modern forms of testimonies, history writing and public remembering in the early modern period, to the present day. In focusing on narrative, broadly defined, the contributors not only explore civil war testimonies, historiography and memory as separate fields of inquiry, but also highlight the interplay between these areas, which are shown to share porous boundaries. Chapters look at the ways in which various narrative forms feed off each other, be they oral, written or visual narratives, personal or collective accounts, or testimonies from victims or perpetrators.