Chapter 6 - Mourning, Elegy, Memorialization from the Civil War to Vietnam

Summary

America’s wars have always prompted works of literature that confront the subject of death and commemoration. This essay opens with an overview of relevant genres and conventions, both in poetry and prose, spawned by America’s bloodiest conflict, the Civil War. Attention then turns to various memorial texts during World War I, and book-length literary responses to death during the Great War, World War II, and the American War in Vietnam. The essay highlights personal and public interpretations of death in Melville’s Battlepieces and Aspects of the War, World War I-era representations of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain” and Across the River and Into the Trees, and Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country.