The issue of war in the United States is a crucial topic that has been copiously examined yet remains relatively misunderstood, especially given the importance of war for national identity and its consistent presence in 240 years of US history. To his great credit, Vincent engages pointedly with this chronic character of warfare, as his title suggests, with its allusion to the famous remark by Randolph Bourne in the wake of World War I, namely that “war is essentially the health of the state” (4). The book looks at war fiction, and occasionally memoirs, during the period of what he calls the “long modernism,” from 1890 to 1964, focussing on three main phases: the legacy of the Civil War and how it was used by progressive discourse, the mobilization campaigns of World War I and their postwar fallout, and finally the way World War II narrative and memory played out in the context of the Cold War. Surveying a broad range of war literature from the 1890s to the period just before the Vietnam War, Vincent offers a detailed portrait of American war fiction and memory and its recurring mobilization in the service of political fantasy and hegemony.

Vincent's work represents a refreshing change of focus from trauma studies, which has dominated war scholarship in recent years, to the political imagination, i.e. how each generation imagines its relation to the collective, to state power, to citizenship, and how this is mediated through narratives of mobilization, combat, death, and survival. Specifically, Vincent is concerned with how war has shaped liberal capitalist hegemony and the role that culture – such as fiction – has played in the mediation between political abstractions of collective life (e.g. society, the state, the republic) and citizens’ imaginative and affective conceptions of those abstractions. He argues that in this period war literature was a particularly potent site of ideological mobilization, rearrangement and, just as importantly, resistance and critique.

Vincent begins with Civil War memory in the 1890s and the way that it was used by Progressives as a means of mobilizing social solidarity at a political moment in which laissez-faire capitalism, local affiliation and liberal individualism were at their height. As a counterforce to these tendencies, memories of war offered what Vincent calls its “socializing prospects,” and “particularly its story of collective sacrifice” (16). It is one of the enduring paradoxes of war and its memory that even the most divisive moments of collective violence, such as the Civil War, return in cultural memory as narratives of cooperation and collective unity. In the next chapter, Vincent focusses on World War I, the “preparedness” movement, and the militarization of American culture in the years leading up to the war. Vincent shows that the war would often be cast in these early years as a spiritual struggle for the “destiny” of “civilization” itself, and how the nation's conscience was appealed to through a focus on the “moral mystery” represented by self-sacrifice (59).

In both of these first chapters, Vincent devotes a subsection to women writers and their specific self-positioning in relation to the larger issues at stake, though no consistent divergence appears from this focus, as many women writers aligned themselves with the mobilization movement while only a few scathingly denounced the waste and travesty of war (64). In the third chapter, Vincent pulls race into his optical frame and examines postwar modernism in terms of the ongoing tensions and conflicts within the United States and the emergence of a new forward-looking preparedness paradigm. He also examines the novels of several key African American writers of the period, such as Claude McKay and Jessie Fauset, to unpack the “multiple dilemmas of affiliation” that black Americans were presented with (93).

The second half of the book is devoted to the literature of World War II in the context of what Vincent terms “the liberal warfare state” (123). He begins with the Popular Front and the early antifascist internationalism among American writers, then in the following chapter moves to the more resigned and conservative fiction of the postwar period, some of which helped consolidate the military–industrial state. A final chapter examines the work of minority authors who refuse the “liberal imperial” politics of the Cold War and who set the stage for the civil rights and feminist movements of the decades that would follow. The focus of this last chapter is squarely on the internal politics of social control that Vincent shows are consistently a vital part of the ideological work of foreign war and its representation in the public sphere. Though occasionally weighed down by unnecessarily dense prose, Vincent's work offers a valuable and well-researched contribution to the understanding of war in American culture of the early to mid-twentieth century.