Information about War Novel
A war novel is a novel in which the primary action takes place in a field of armed combat, or in a domestic setting (or home front) where the characters are preoccupied with the preparations for, or recovery from, war.
As the prose fiction novel rose to prominence in the seventeenth century, the war novel began to develop its modern form, although most novels featuring war were picaresque satires in which the soldier was rakish rather than realistic figure. An example of one such work is Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus, a semi-autobiographical account of the Thirty Years' War.
An important sub-genre of war fiction included works about war between European settlers and Aboriginal Peoples in North America, seen for instance in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Major John Richardson. In the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the war novel also entered the realm of popular fiction through the adventurous war novels of Ralph Connor, G. A. Henty, and Rudyard Kipling. These latter novelists emphasized the heroic and patriotic aspects of war. They were the last war novelists to write with a blatantly imperialist or romantic mindset, an outlook that became ever-harder to espouse in the wake of the post-industrial wars and genocides of the twentieth century.
The post-1918 period produced a vast range of war novels, including such "home front" novels as Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier, about a shell shocked soldier's difficult re-integration into British society; Romain Rolland's Clérambault, about a grieving father's enraged protest against French militarism; and John Dos Passos's Three Soldiers, one of a relatively small number of American novels about the First World War.
Also in the post-World War I period, the theme of war began to inhabit an increasing number of modernist novels, many of which were not "war novels" in the conventional sense, but which featured characters whose psychological trauma and alienation from society stemmed directly from wartime experiences. One example this type of novel is Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, in which a key subplot concerns the tortuous descent of a young veteran, Septimus Warren Smith, toward insanity and suicide.
The late 1920s saw the rise of the so-called "war book boom," during which many men who had fought during the war were finally ready to write openly and critically about their war experiences. In 1929, Erich Maria Remarque's Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) was a massive, world-wide bestseller, not least for its brutally realistic account of the horrors of trench warfare from the perspective of a German infantryman. Also successful were Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, William March's Company K, Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero, Arnold Zweig's Der Streit un den Sergeanten Grischa (The Case of Sergeant Grischa), and Charles Yale Harrison's Generals Die in Bed--the latter one of the most bitter accounts of war ever written.
Novels about World War I continued to trickle into print throughout the 1930s. One particular development during this decade was the rise in popularity of historical novels about earlier wars. Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, which recalls the American Civil War, is a quintessential example of works of this type.
The decades following World War II period also saw the rise in significant parallel genres to the war novel. One is the Holocaust novel, of which A.M. Klein's The Second Scroll, Primo Levi's If Not Now, When?, and William Styron's Sophie's Choice are key examples. Another is the novel of internment or persecution (other than in the Holocaust), in which characters find themselves imprisoned or deprived of their civil rights as a direct result of war. Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (about imprisonment in a Russian labor camp), and Joy Kogawa's Obasan (about Canada's deportation and internment of its citizens of Japanese descent during WWII) are two examples of novels that address war from alternative perspectives.
In the wake of postmodernism and the absence of wars equalling the magnitude of the two world wars, the majority of war novelists have concentrated on how memory and the ambiguities of time affect the meaning and experience of war. In her Regeneration Trilogy, British novelist Pat Barker reimagines World War I from a contemporary perspective. Ian McEwan's novels Black Dogs and Atonement take a similarly retrospective approach to World War II, including such events as the British retreat from Dunkirk in 1941 and the Nazi invasion of France. The work of W. G. Sebald, most notably Austerlitz, is a postmodern inquiry into German's struggle to come to terms with its troubled past.
Some contemporary emphasize action and intrigue above thematic depth. Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October is a technically detailed account of submarine espionage during the Cold War, and many of John LeCarre's spy novels are basically war novels for an age in which bureaucracy often replaces open combat. Another adaptation is the apocalyptic Christian novel, which focuses on the final showdown between universal forces of good and evil. Tim LaHaye is the novelist most readily associated with this genre. Many fantasy novels, too, use the traditional war novel as a departure point for depictions of fictional wars in imaginary realms.
The post-9/11 literary world has produced few war novels that address current events in the War on Terrorism. One example is Chris Cleave's Incendiary (2005), which made headlines after its publication, for appearing to anticipate the 7 July 2005 London bombings.
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History of the war novel
Origins
The war novel's main roots lie in the epic poetry of the classical and medieval periods, especially Homer's The Iliad, Virgil's The Aeneid, the Old English saga Beowulf, and different versions of the legends of King Arthur. All of these epics were concerned with preserving the history or mythology of conflicts between different societies, while providing an accessible narrative that could reinforce the collective memory of a people. Other important influences on the war novel included the tragedies of such dramatists as Euripides, Seneca the Younger, Christopher Marlowe, and Shakespeare. Shakespeare's Henry V provided a quintessential model for how the history, tactics, and ethics of war could be combined in an essentially fictional framework. Romances and satires in Early Modern Europe--Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote, to name two of many--also contained elements of military heroism and folly that influenced the later development of war novels. In terms of imagery and symbolism, many modern war novels (especially those espousing an anti-war viewpoint) take their cue from Dante's depiction of Hell in The Inferno, John Milton's account of the war in Heaven in Paradise Lost, and the Apocalypse as depicted in the Book of Revelations.As the prose fiction novel rose to prominence in the seventeenth century, the war novel began to develop its modern form, although most novels featuring war were picaresque satires in which the soldier was rakish rather than realistic figure. An example of one such work is Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus, a semi-autobiographical account of the Thirty Years' War.
19th century war novels
The war novel came of age during the nineteenth century. Works such as Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma, featuring the Battle of Waterloo, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, about the Napoleonic Wars in Russia, and Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, about the American Civil War established the conventions of the modern war novel as it has come down to us today. All of these works feature realistic depictions of major battles, visceral scenes of wartime horrors and atrocities, and significant insights into the nature of heroism, cowardice, and morality in wartime.An important sub-genre of war fiction included works about war between European settlers and Aboriginal Peoples in North America, seen for instance in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Major John Richardson. In the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the war novel also entered the realm of popular fiction through the adventurous war novels of Ralph Connor, G. A. Henty, and Rudyard Kipling. These latter novelists emphasized the heroic and patriotic aspects of war. They were the last war novelists to write with a blatantly imperialist or romantic mindset, an outlook that became ever-harder to espouse in the wake of the post-industrial wars and genocides of the twentieth century.
World War I and after
World War I produced an unprecedented number of war novels, by writers from countries on all sides of the conflict. One of the first and most influential of these was the 1916 novel Le Feu (or Under Fire) by the French novelist and soldier Henri Barbusse. Barbusse's novel, with its open criticism of nationalist dogma and military incompetence, initiated the anti-war movement in literature that flourished after the war.The post-1918 period produced a vast range of war novels, including such "home front" novels as Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier, about a shell shocked soldier's difficult re-integration into British society; Romain Rolland's Clérambault, about a grieving father's enraged protest against French militarism; and John Dos Passos's Three Soldiers, one of a relatively small number of American novels about the First World War.
Also in the post-World War I period, the theme of war began to inhabit an increasing number of modernist novels, many of which were not "war novels" in the conventional sense, but which featured characters whose psychological trauma and alienation from society stemmed directly from wartime experiences. One example this type of novel is Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, in which a key subplot concerns the tortuous descent of a young veteran, Septimus Warren Smith, toward insanity and suicide.
The late 1920s saw the rise of the so-called "war book boom," during which many men who had fought during the war were finally ready to write openly and critically about their war experiences. In 1929, Erich Maria Remarque's Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) was a massive, world-wide bestseller, not least for its brutally realistic account of the horrors of trench warfare from the perspective of a German infantryman. Also successful were Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, William March's Company K, Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero, Arnold Zweig's Der Streit un den Sergeanten Grischa (The Case of Sergeant Grischa), and Charles Yale Harrison's Generals Die in Bed--the latter one of the most bitter accounts of war ever written.
Novels about World War I continued to trickle into print throughout the 1930s. One particular development during this decade was the rise in popularity of historical novels about earlier wars. Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, which recalls the American Civil War, is a quintessential example of works of this type.
World War II and after
World War II gave rise to a new boom in contemporary war novels. Unlike World War I novels, a European-dominated genre, World War II novels were produced in the greatest numbers by American writers, who made war in the air, on the sea, and in key theatres such as the Pacific Ocean and Asia integral to the war novel. Among the most successful American war novels were Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny, James Jones's From Here to Eternity, and Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, the latter a novel set in the Spanish Civil War. An exception to American writers was Pierre Boulle's Le Pont de la rivière Kwaï (1952- The Bridge on the River Kwai) He served as a secret agent under the name Peter John Rule and helped the resistance movement in China, Burma and French Indochina. More experimental and unconventional works in the post-war period included Joseph Heller's satirical Catch-22 and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, an early example of postmodernism. Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions, William Woodruff's Vessel of Sadness and James Jones' The Thin Red Line, all explore the personal nature of war within the context of intense combat.The decades following World War II period also saw the rise in significant parallel genres to the war novel. One is the Holocaust novel, of which A.M. Klein's The Second Scroll, Primo Levi's If Not Now, When?, and William Styron's Sophie's Choice are key examples. Another is the novel of internment or persecution (other than in the Holocaust), in which characters find themselves imprisoned or deprived of their civil rights as a direct result of war. Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (about imprisonment in a Russian labor camp), and Joy Kogawa's Obasan (about Canada's deportation and internment of its citizens of Japanese descent during WWII) are two examples of novels that address war from alternative perspectives.
Vietnam and after
After World War II, the war that has attracted the greatest number of novelists is the Vietnam War. Graham Greene's The Quiet American was the first novel to explore the origins of the Vietnam war in the French colonial atmosphere of the 1950s. Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried is a cycle of Vietnam vignettes that reads like a novel. The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh is a poignant account of the war from the Vietnamese perspective.In the wake of postmodernism and the absence of wars equalling the magnitude of the two world wars, the majority of war novelists have concentrated on how memory and the ambiguities of time affect the meaning and experience of war. In her Regeneration Trilogy, British novelist Pat Barker reimagines World War I from a contemporary perspective. Ian McEwan's novels Black Dogs and Atonement take a similarly retrospective approach to World War II, including such events as the British retreat from Dunkirk in 1941 and the Nazi invasion of France. The work of W. G. Sebald, most notably Austerlitz, is a postmodern inquiry into German's struggle to come to terms with its troubled past.
Some contemporary emphasize action and intrigue above thematic depth. Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October is a technically detailed account of submarine espionage during the Cold War, and many of John LeCarre's spy novels are basically war novels for an age in which bureaucracy often replaces open combat. Another adaptation is the apocalyptic Christian novel, which focuses on the final showdown between universal forces of good and evil. Tim LaHaye is the novelist most readily associated with this genre. Many fantasy novels, too, use the traditional war novel as a departure point for depictions of fictional wars in imaginary realms.
The post-9/11 literary world has produced few war novels that address current events in the War on Terrorism. One example is Chris Cleave's Incendiary (2005), which made headlines after its publication, for appearing to anticipate the 7 July 2005 London bombings.
Further reading
Other significant war novelists
- Michael Shaara ("The Killer Angels" - Gettysburg- American Civil War)
- Jeff Shaara ("The Rising Tide (book)" - WWII and many other books)
- Elie Wiesel (Night - Holocaust)
- Martin Amis (Time's Arrow - Holocaust)
- David Bergen (The Time in Between - Vietnam)
- Elias Canetti (Auto da Fe - WWI)
- James Chapman (Glass (Pray the Electrons Back to Sand) - Gulf War)
- Charles Sheehan-Miles ( - Gulf War)
- Hugo Claus (Sorrow of Belgium - WWI)
- Stuart Cloete (Rags of Glory - South African War)
- F. M. Cutlack (Breaker Morant - South African War)
- E. L. Doctorow (The March - US Civil War)
- William Faulkner (Soldier's Pay - WWI)
- Sebastian Faulks (Birdsong - WWI)
- Timothy Findley (The Wars, Famous Last Words (book) - WWI/ II)
- Ford Madox Ford (Parade's End - WWI)
- Joseph Heller (Catch-22 - WWII)
- Charles Frazier (Cold Mountain - US Civil War)
- Robert Graves (I Claudius, et al. - Roman Wars)
- Gustav Hasford (The Short-Timers, The Phantom Blooper - US Vietnam War)
- Walter Dean Myers (Fallen Angels - US Vietnam War)
- Frances Itani (Deafening - WWI)
- Ha Jin (War Trash - Korean War)
- Thomas Keneally (Schindler's Ark - Holocaust)
- William Woodruff (Vessel of Sadness - WWII)
- D. H. Lawrence (Kangaroo - WWI)
- Robert Ludlum (The Bourne Identity et al. - Cold War)
- Józef Mackiewicz (The Road to Nowhere - WWII)
- Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead - WWII)
- Colin McDougall (Execution - WWII)
- Boris Pasternak (Dr. Zhivago - Russian Revolution)
- Siegfried Sassoon (Memoirs of an Infantry Officer - WWI)
- Henryk Sienkiewicz (The Trilogy - Polish historical)
- Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five - Vietnam / WWII)
- Evelyn Waugh (Sword of Honour - WWII)
- Richard Hooker ( - Korean War)
- J. G. Ballard (Empire of the Sun - WWII)
Critical studies of the war novel
- Philip D. Beidler, American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam (U Georgia Press)
- Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War (Macmillan).
- Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: British, American and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914-1933 (UBC Press).
- Evelyn Cobley, Representing War: Form and Ideology in First World War Narratives (U of Toronto Press).
- Stanley Cooperman. World War I and the American Novel (Johns Hopkins UP).
- Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford UP).
- David Craig and Michael Egan. Extreme Situations: Literature and Crisis from the Great War to the Atom Bomb (Macmillan).
- Saul S. Friedman, ed. Holocaust Literature: A Collection of Critical, Historical, and Literary Writings (Greenwood Press)
- Horowitz, Sara R, Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction (SUNY UP). ISBN 0-7914-3130-4
- Madison and Schaefer, eds. Encyclopedia of American War Literature (Greenwood Press). ISBN 0-313-30648-6
- Dagmar Novak, Dubious Glory: The Canadian Novel and the Two World Wars (Peter Lang).
- Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (WW Norton).
See also
- American Civil War
- Epic poetry
- Paul Fussell
- William March
- Ernest Hemingway
- The Holocaust in Art and Literature
- Napoleonic Wars
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- Stendhal
- Leo Tolstoy
- Vietnam War
- World War I
- World War II
- List of films based on war books
novel (from, Italian novella, Spanish novela, French nouvelle for "new", "news", or "short story of something new") is today a long prose narrative set out in writing.
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Combat, or fighting, is purposeful violent conflict intended to establish dominance over the opposition.
The term "combat" (French for "fight") typically refers to armed conflict between military forces in warfare, whereas the more general term "fighting" can refer to
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The term "combat" (French for "fight") typically refers to armed conflict between military forces in warfare, whereas the more general term "fighting" can refer to
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Home front is the informal term commonly used to describe the civilian populace of the nation at war as an active support system of its military. In the political jargon of militarists or nationalists, it implies the imperative of effective militarisation of a society, and a
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fictional character is any person, persona, identity, or entity whose existence originates from a work of fiction. The process of creating and developing characters in a work of fiction is called characterization.
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WAR is a three-letter abbreviation with multiple meanings, as described below:
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- War
- War (band)
- War (film), a 2007 movie starring Jet Li and Jason Statham
- Warrenton Railroad (AAR reporting marks WAR)
- WAR, a Japanese professional wrestling promotion
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For other meanings of epic, see .
The epic is long, exalted narrative poetry, generally concerning a serious subject and details the heroic deeds and events important to a culture or nation...... Click the link for more information.
Classics or Classical Studies is the branch of the Humanities dealing with the languages, literature, history, art, and other aspects of the ancient Mediterranean world; especially Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome during the time known as classical antiquity, roughly
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Middle Ages form the middle period in a traditional schematic division of European history into three "ages": the classical civilization of Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Modern Times.
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Homer is the name given to the purported author of the early Greek poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. It is now generally believed that they were composed by illiterate aoidoi (rhapsodes) in an oral tradition in the 8th or 7th century BC.
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iLiad is an electronic handheld device, or e-book device, which can be used for document reading and editing. Like the Sony Reader, the iLiad makes use of an electronic paper display.
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Description
Main specifications:- an 8.1-inch (20.
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Publius Vergilius Maro
A bust of Virgil, from the entrance to his tomb in Naples, Italy.
Born: October 15, 70 BC
Andes, North Italy
Died: September 21, 19 BC
Brundisium
Occupation: Poet
Nationality: Roman
Genres: Epic poetry
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A bust of Virgil, from the entrance to his tomb in Naples, Italy.
Born: October 15, 70 BC
Andes, North Italy
Died: September 21, 19 BC
Brundisium
Occupation: Poet
Nationality: Roman
Genres: Epic poetry
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Aeneid (IPA English pronunciation: [əˈniːɪd]; in Latin Aeneis, pronounced [aɪˈne.
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Old English/Anglo-Saxon}}}
Language codes
ISO 639-1: none
ISO 639-2: ang
ISO 639-3: ang Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon[1], Englisc
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Language codes
ISO 639-1: none
ISO 639-2: ang
ISO 639-3: ang Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon[1], Englisc
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Beowulf is an Old English heroic epic[1] poem of anonymous authorship whose dating is uncertain. Its creation is typically assigned by scholars either to the period 700–750 AD, or to the time of composition of the only manuscript, circa 1010.
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King Arthur is a fabled Brython leader and a prominent figure in Britain's legendary history. A real individual may have been the inspiration of the legend, but later stories of Arthur are almost entirely fictional.
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History is the study of the past, focused on human activity and leading up to the present day.[1] More precisely, history is the continuous, systematic narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race [1]
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The word mythology (from the Greek μύθολογία mythologÃa, from μυθολογείν mythologein
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Collective memory is a term coined by Maurice Halbwachs, separating the notion from the individual memory. The collective memory is shared, passed on and also constructed by the group, or modern society.
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In a figurative sense a tragedy (from Classical Greek τραγωδία, "song for the goat", see below) is any event with a sad and unfortunate outcome, but the term also applies specifically in Western culture to a form of drama defined by
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Euripides (Ancient Greek: Εὐριπίδης) (ca. 480 BC–406 BC) was the last of the three great tragedians of classical Athens (the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles).
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Lucius Annaeus Seneca (often known simply as Seneca, or Seneca the Younger) (ca. 4 BC–AD 65) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and in one work humorist, of the Silver Age of Latin literature.
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Christopher Marlowe
An anonymous portrait in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, often believed to show Christopher Marlowe.
Born: Unknown, baptised 26 February 1564
Canterbury, England
Died: 30 May 1593
Deptford, England
Occupation: Playwright, poet
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An anonymous portrait in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, often believed to show Christopher Marlowe.
Born: Unknown, baptised 26 February 1564
Canterbury, England
Died: 30 May 1593
Deptford, England
Occupation: Playwright, poet
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William Shakespeare
The Chandos portrait, artist and authenticity unconfirmed. National Portrait Gallery, London.
Born: April 1564 (exact date unknown)
Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England
Died: 23 March 1616
Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England
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The Chandos portrait, artist and authenticity unconfirmed. National Portrait Gallery, London.
Born: April 1564 (exact date unknown)
Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England
Died: 23 March 1616
Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England
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Henry V, also known as The Cronicle History of Henry the fift, is a play by William Shakespeare based on the life of King Henry V of England. It deals with the events immediately before and after the Battle of Agincourt during the Hundred Years' War.
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Military tactics (Greek: Taktikē, the art of organizing an army) are the collective name for methods for engaging and defeating an enemy in battle. Changes in philosophy and technology over time have been reflected in changes to military tactics.
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Ethics (via Latin ethica from the Ancient Greek ἠθική [φιλοσοφία]
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romance or chivalric romance refers to a style of heroic prose and verse narrative current in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.
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Characteristics of the romance
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Satire (from Latin satura, not from the Greek mythological figure satyr[1]) is a literary genre, chiefly literary and dramatic, in which human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision,
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The early modern period is a term used by historians to refer to the period in Western Europe and its first colonies which spans the two centuries between the Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution.
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Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–13 January, 1599) was an English poet and Poet Laureate. Spenser is a controversial figure due to his zeal for the destruction of Irish culture and colonisation of Ireland, yet he is one of the premier craftsmen of Modern English verse in its infancy.
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