Shadows of doubt: The American historical war novels of James Fenimore Cooper, Stephen Crane and Thomas Pynchon

This dissertation will examine the ramifications of an overlooked distinction between war novels written by combat veterans and historical war novels that are imaginative reconstructions of battle generated by authors who never fought. In the first chapter, after delineating a brief history of the war novel in America, I will examine how historical war novels, namely The Spy, The Pilot, Lionel Lincoln, and Wyandotte by Cooper; The Red Badge of Courage by Crane; and Gravity's Rainbow by Pynchon belong to a distinct subgenre of the war novel that is characterized by its greater historical perspective, the distance the novels achieve from the hysteria surrounding a war, and their dissent from widely accepted cultural interpretations of that war. These novels are characterized by a process of pentimento, through which the authors examine the relationship of a war to its own aftermath; ultimately these novels trace the ills of the contemporary to some seminal trauma in the past.; The second chapter will examine the historical war novels of Cooper, which depict the author's growing misgivings about his young nation. Through the course of the four novels I discuss Cooper lays the blame for the excessive individualism and tendency to demagoguery of his contemporary moment on the consequences of a war for independence that was--though necessary--a metaphorical regicide and therefore an assault upon hierarchy itself.; The third chapter will show how Crane embeds a critique of the America of the 1890s in his tale of the Civil War. Crane depicts the crimes against individuality, freedom and humanity that are inherent in war and implies that these crimes are parallel and even causally connected to the brutal nature of the industrial worker's life in Crane's time.; The fourth chapter will discuss Pynchon's identification of holocaust as the defining cultural trauma of the Second World War, a trauma that continued to punctuate American experience in the 1960s. According to Pynchon, such contemporary phenomena as the Cold War, the military-industrial complex, and Vietnam are all directly attributable to a modern mindset that nourishes itself with acts of literal and metaphorical mass murder.