This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the question of when, why and how it is just for a people to go to war - or refrain from warring - in a post-9/11 world. Centering the humanities as a collective body of knowledge and practices particularly well-suited to such ethical deliberation, it explores representations of just war theory in American fictive and non-fictive accounts of the experience of war. Drawing on a wide range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, it analyses six criteria of just war: right intention, legitimate authority, just cause, probability of success and last resort, as well as exploring , the law that governs the way in which warfare is conducted. Each chapter analyses different authors’ responses to the experience of war, including Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Tim O’Brien, Ernest Hemingway and Kevin Powers. Combining just war ethics with artistic representations, it offers the first sustained reflection on just war theory in literary studies. weiterlesen