This book seeks to uncover the ways in which six historical novels fashion or rewrite the history of the Korean War, seeking out the narrative strategies employed in each rewriting. As narrated in each of these novels, the Korean War ranges from an international war through a civil war to a war between the genders before culminating in what I will be calling the ‘de-escalating of the Cold War’. Whichever shape it takes, however, this war cannot be considered apart from its international dimension – that is, the Cold War. In employing the term ‘Cold War’, this book aligns itself with the new perspectives advanced by scholars such as Heonik Kwon and Jodi Kim, who have suggested that the Cold War is an epistemology that not only informs and organises the social order but intervenes in meaning production. Seen in this way, the Cold War provides a new framework in which to consider both the Korean War and the historical or Korean War novel itself. This project is also indebted to the work of scholars such as Bruce Cumings and Kim Dong-Choon, whose revisionist expertise helped to recover a civil war dimension to what was known as a proxy war.