"When I Have Your Wounded...": Warrior Reification in American Fiction

The focus of this study is literary war narrative in the traditional canon. Its hypothesis is that the tropes, structure, and characterization in this type of narrative remain essentially unchanged for over a hundred years, despite political and sociological evolution in progressive scholar and artist communities. The author posits the following causes for this: nationalistic, universal, and linguistic archetypal constructs, an entrenched literary tradition, and equally entrenched academic creative writing workshop training that feeds publishing constraints. The effects, he contends, are persistent implicit support from ostensible war-critic progressives for a contrived, reified, destructive masculine ethos which perpetuates subaltern identities within marginalized populations.