The notion of an ‘aesthetics of war’ immediately raises questions about how artistic cynosures concerned with order, beauty, and the discernment of taste can be applied to the ignoble horrors of modern warfare. For that very reason, modern literature has striven to find aesthetic alternatives to the mandates of direct representation. In the first half of the twentieth century, this striving is starkly visible, as an aesthetics of realism (practiced by the War Poets) vies with an aesthetics of indirection (evident in the modernist works of Yeats and Woolf). In the second half of the century, in the shadow of nuclear terror, there is a turn to the satirical and the scabrous – most notably, in the trio of American World War II novels that defined the field for a generation or more: Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Gravity’s Rainbow. Subsequently, wars in Vietnam and Bosnia prompt writers to use field reportage in resourceful, post-realist ways, sometimes echoing modernist poetics. Examining the aesthetic changes noted above, this chapter shows how the formal conundrum of representation has been illuminated, engaged with and, ultimately, used to productive ends in modern war literature.

This chapter explores the relation between the novel form and the emergence of postmodernism, postcolonialism, postfeminism and posthumanism in the second half of the twentieth century. It begins with an analysis of the relation between the prosthetic and the simulacral, under postmodern conditions, and with the technological revolution associated with the advent of computing. The novel, it suggests, from Orwell to Brooke-Rose, is involved in a difficult relationship with postmodernism, one which gives expression to its possibilities, while also seeking to resist its erosion of the materiality of our cultures and environments. It traces a strand of experimental realism in the postwar novel that is at odds with the terms in which we have conceived of postmodern fiction. It then goes on to read two of the novelists who are associated with the postmodern novel – Thomas Pynchon and Toni Morrison – to suggest that one can detect a persistent opposition in their work between the simulacrum and the prosthetic, one which helps us see past some of the contradictions that are the result of our existing accounts of postmodern politics and aesthetics.