Love and War in the Twentieth-Century Novel

War hardly seems to be the best setting for love stories.

Nonetheless, Homer's Iliad puts the criminal love of Helen and Paris front and center in his tale of the Trojan War and Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace foregrounds the unlikely love of Pierre Buzukhov for Natasha Rostov.

The contrast of battle and courting spotlights crises of value and feeling in private and public life, most clearly the contrast of power serving creative union in personal life versus power as overwhelming, often destructive domination in conflict between armies and states.

The three novels covered in this course, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (1929), The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen (1948), and The English Patient by Michael Ondaajte (1992), set in WWI and WWII and its aftermath, all showcase the poignant ambiguity of power as liberating creativity in love and as destructive domination in war, and all do so in prose of illuminating beauty.