The representation of the Iraq War in selected Anglo-American and Iraqi novels

Abstract

This thesis explores representation of the Iraq War in selected Anglo-American and Iraqi novels, examining how several authors have employed this theme in their narratives. The featured novelists are chosen from many writers who focus their efforts and their writing on this conflict. Criterion for selection included offering a critique of the diverse perspectives from which the conflict was perceived, the texts‘ engagement with the political conundrums underpinning war and its approach, how such fiction engages with a contemporary audience and what perspective are deployed to do so. Their public visibility provides the basis of one interpretative strand of the thesis. This study also explores and conceptualises how this conflict has entered the cultural consciousness and to what degree the novels fictionalise the conflict as their main subject, and assesses through which thematic emphases. The texts chosen and to be analysed are pivotal to our understanding of contemporary Iraq and its recent history. It will be argued that the thematic content of these texts contextualise modern war‘s multiple effects within not only the fictional textual world, but as well as their imaginative characters these representations become part of the experience at least vicariously of the audiences who read them. The texts discussed in subsequent chapters are either originally written in, or translated into English (for publication), and therefore all available in English, one major criterion of textual selection. It is interesting to examine the theme of the Iraq War and the historical and pragmatic vein and cultural point of reference from which authors write and has come to dominate the discourse of some contemporary novelists. The goal is to critically explore how the war has become a focal point and the framework of their narratives. The thesis will attempt to analyse how such novels depict the effects of political violence and why they are drawn to powerfully articulate the gruelling reality and experience of those fictionally engaged by and/or affected by it. It will be proposed that novels of and about this conflict are essential to study, understand, and engage with because of the content and the message they attempt to convey which is so crucial to understanding contemporary faultiness in socio-cultural histories, and the critical themes they utilize in writing and the dynamics through which they fictionalize their stories. Such fictional representations of this war serve an important societal, cultural, aesthetic and symbolic function. Thus the study encapsulates how novels of and about the Iraq War reveal and recapture the physical, psychological, and interpersonal losses that are felt by the civilians and military alike.