"In song, verse, narrative, and dramatic form, war literature has existed for nearly all of recorded history Accounts of war continue to occupy American bestseller lists and the stacks of American libraries. This innovative work establishes the Amerian novel of war as its own sub-genre within American war literature, creating standards by which such works can be classified and critically and popularly analyzed. Each chapter identifies a defnining characteristic, analyzes existing criticism, and explores the characteristic in American war novels of record. Topics include violence, war rhetoric, the death of noncombatants, and terrain as an enemy" From the back cover

Wallis R. Sanborn, III, author of Animals in the Fiction of Cormac McCarthy (McFarland, 2006), teaches at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas. His work has appeared in Gale's Contemporary Literary Criticism..."