The notion that war plays a fundamental role in the United States' idea of itself obscures the rich--and by no means nave--seam of anti-war thinking that winds through American culture.

Giorgio Mariani engages with the question of what makes a text anti-war. Ranging from Emerson and Joel Barlow to Maxine Hong Kingston and Tim O'Brien, Waging War on War explores why sustained attempts at identifying the anti-war text's formal and philosophical features seem to always end at an impasse. Mariani moves a step beyond to construct a theoretical model that invites new inquiries into America's nonviolent, nonconformist tradition even as it challenges the ways we study U.S. warmaking and the cultural reactions to it. In the process, he defines anti-war literature and explores the genre's role in the assertive peacefighting project that offered--and still offers--alternatives to violence.

Giorgio Mariani is a professor of American literature at the Sapienza University of Rome. He is the author of Spectacular Narratives: Representations of Class and War in Stephen Crane and American Popular Literature of the 1890s .