Traditional approaches to the “war novel” and “the literature of war” have focused mostly on cultural reactions to specific wars, accepting a causal relationship that privileges the historical event over its representation. The Civil War takes place, and we have the cultural “response.” Edmund Wilson's famous Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962) is a good example of this approach. Since Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), however, the relationship between “war literature” and the “event” of warfare has been treated in a more dialectical manner. Literature and other cultural production may predict war, warn us away from it, prepare us emotionally for it, even help legitimate warfare. Cultural work may also help us understand certain social and political issues as inextricable from violent conflict, even when not identified as specific wars. In focusing only on the Haitian Revolution or the American Civil War, for example, we tend to ignore the long histories of struggle against colonialism and slavery that culminated in warfare. In considering only those wars officially recognized by the US government, we forget the military campaigns waged by the US against native peoples in the course of westward expansion. In thinking conventionally about warfare in political and strategic ways, we also tend to ignore the consequences for non-combatants. In historical periods when women participated in warfare primarily in supporting or defensive roles, their experiences of war were often ignored. By the same token, children and the elderly and other non-combatants figure only in the backgrounds of many classic “war novels.”