Writing Bodily Resistance in World War II Literature

This special issue focuses on the recurrent depiction of the broken, abject, or “unhealed” body as a potent site of resistance within literary and filmic renderings of World War II and its long aftermath. World War II scholarship has been slow to decouple its formulations of “resistance” from martial paradigms rooted in the activities of politically and militarily organized partisan movements. Contributors to the issue question the presumed passivity of abject and unorthodoxly embodied figures in mid- and late twentieth-century war literature and film, examining how modes of physical abjection and nonconforming corporeality could be—and were—rewritten as a potential mode of “bodily resistance.”

Contributors: Douglas Atkinson, James Brophy, Patrick Burley, William Davies, Megan Girdwood, Lisa Mullen, Zhao Ng, Korine Powers, Hannah Simpson