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Philip D. Beidler, Beautiful War: Studies in a Dreadful Fascination, University of Alabama Press, 2016
Philip Beidler's Beautiful War helps us make sense of our aesthetic fascination with war, by capturing the human process by which a people's history and memory are built out of the way it tells its war stories. The process Beidler illustrates in these essays has to do with how war stories, war memoires, and war art are appropriated, even as they are generated, as the building blocks of entire political, cultural, and social systems.
Beidler's collection of essays on war art is as much a cultural as an aesthetic study, and is intensely relevant today, as we struggle to comprehend the cultural implications of a tumultuous social and political response to the age of the war on terror. Each of Beidler's chapters show us a complex process by which cultural legacies emerge to reflect the popular aesthetic response to a war, and then these legacies themselves become the building blocks of a new cultural identity constructed out of such previously inherited strands of history and memory.
Beidler starts his study at that moment in the west when art shows us "war emerging from myth in the traditional sense to become a rationalized instrument of state power." Although sensitive to the systematic, impersonal forces of militarized systems, Beidler is ultimately interested in the individual experience, so the Renaissance is a natural place for him to begin this series of case studies in war aesthetics. Shakespeare marks this moment, when humanism appears alongside a dawning self-awareness of political process. Beidler's opening chapter is a study of soldiering in Shakespeare that documents the spirit of Shakespeare's age, in which older mythologies are insufficient, and "new definitions of human individuality are reconfigured against the ideological backdrop ofthe militarized modern nation state." Beidler's diverse subjects in Beautiful War go on to include (among others) the literature of American colonial wars against the Five Tribes, the popular cinematic renderings of the American civil war, and WWI and WWII British and American literature, painting, and music.
Beidler is a keen observer of social architecture, and this collection includes studies of urban space from Beidler's extensive travels. Beidler's work emphasizes the study of existing works of art, but...