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Humankind has always waged war. And people have been telling stories about war ever since they started fighting them. George Vlachonikolis reviews Men At War: What Fiction Tells us About Conflict, From The Iliad to Catch-22, in which Christopher Coker aims “to grasp the essence of war as a cultural phenomenon through its existential codes instantiated by 25 literary figures.”  Here are the stories in which those figures appear:

1. The Iliad, by Homer
2. Aeneid, by Virgil
3. Hadji Murat, by Leo Tolstoy
4. The Aubrey-Maturin series, by Patrick O’Brian
5. “Human Moments in World War III,” in The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories by Don Delillo
6. The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane
7. The Complete Brigadier General, by Arthur Conan Doyle
8. Her Privates We, Frederic Manning
9. For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
10. Kaputt, by Curzio Malaparte
11. The Duel, by Joseph Conrad
12. The Confidence Man, by Herman Melville
13. The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
14. Dr Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, by Stanley Kubrick
15. Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
16. Henry IV, Part I and Part II, by William Shakespeare
17. The Good Soldier Svejk, by Jaroslav Hasek
18. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
19. The Sorrow of War, by Boa Nimh
20. The Flashman papers, by George MacDonald Fraser
21. Philoctetes, by Sophocles
22. Colonel Chabert, by Honore de Balzac
23. All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque
24. The Sword of Honour Trilogy, Evelyn Waugh
25. Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

Read our review of Coker’s Men At War: What Fiction Tells us About Conflict, From The Iliad to Catch-22.

Image: Combined from Kate Ter Haar and Dennis Jarvis, CC