How We Are Changed by War: A Study of Letters and Diaries from Colonial Conflicts to Operation Iraqi Freedom

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The prolonged conflict in Iraq has shown us warx2019;s transformative effect. Civilians rivet themselves to events happening halfway around the world, while young soldiers return home from battlefields, coping with the memories of those events.xA0; How We Are Changed by War examines our sense of ourselves through the medium of diaries andxA0;wartime correspondence, beginning with the colonists of the earlyxA0;seventeenth century, and ending with the diaries and letters from Iraqi war vets. The book tracks the effects of war in private writings regardless of the narratorx2019;s historical era allowing the writers to x2018;speakx2019; to each other across time to reveal a profound commonality of cultural experience. Finally, interpreting the narratives by how the writers conveyed the content adds a richer layer of meaning through the lenses of psychology and literary criticism, providing a model for any society to examine itself through the medium of its membersx2019; informal writings.

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Diana C. Gill is an independent scholar with a PhD in English from the University of Mississippi at Oxford.