Even from its title, an alliterative paradox followed by a provocative neologism, Waging War on War: Peacefighting in American Literature makes plain the contradictions underpinning its subject matter, just as it embraces the self-evident ethical impulse at the heart of the critique of violence. Giorgio Mariani explains that his interest in “anti-war” literature is rooted in the problematic nature of what is characterized by this slippery label. Consider, for example, the truism that decent human beings are by definition against war (notwithstanding most people's willingness to concede that the exercise of violence can be a necessary evil). Besides, much like the appropriateness of specific military interventions, the anti-war stance of any given text is more often than not in the eye of the beholder.

Even in those cases where the desire to condemn violence is beyond question, “anti-war” literature is constantly at risk of feeding off, and therefore glamourizing, the object of its censure. Having declared that he wishes “precisely to call attention to the aporia lurking in the anti-war perspective” (xi), Mariani opens his study with three chapters providing a sustained exploration of what constitutes resistance to war, both conceptually and rhetorically. Chapter 1 tries to delineate the amorphous contours of the war/anti-war opposition, exploring in depth some of the contradictions already outlined above. Chapter 2, instead, urges us to reconfigure peace as an active force, achievable only through bravery; the genesis of this idea in American thought is traced back to Emerson's 1838 essay “War,” whose principles anticipate the militant nonviolence practiced by Gandhi and King in the twentieth century. Grounded in the analysis of William James's “The Moral Equivalent of War” (1910) and Kenneth Burke's A Grammar of Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), chapter 3 investigates the fraught relationship between language and violence. Through a linguistic and conceptual tour de force of his own, Mariani argues that the inevitable interconnection between words and power does not altogether preclude the possibility of a rhetorical purification of war that would not otherwise be blind to the material horror of military conflict. This section aptly ends with a meticulous analysis of Stephen Crane's “A Mystery of Heroism,” a foretaste of the nuanced close readings to follow in the second part of the monograph.

There, through a combination of fresh interpretations of canonical texts and the rediscovery of lesser-known ones, Mariani begins to sketch an alternative literary tradition – from Joel Barlow's Columbiad (1807) to Brian Turner's and Helen Benedict's writing about the Iraq War – to the one charted by Richard Slotkin's influential study of the mythology of the frontier. However, this peacefighting counternarrative is not offered as a wholesale replacement for the familiar account of America as a “gunfighter nation.” True to his premises, Mariani is just as interested in probing the limitations of the works under analysis as he is keen to tease out and celebrate their resistance to violence.

The self-confessed eclecticism of the choice of primary texts, short of coming across as idiosyncratic or subservient to an overarching thesis, is exploited as an opportunity to modulate the main line of inquiry from different, complementary perspectives: through the lens of genre (Barlow's oxymoronic “peace epic”), gender (La Motte's scrutiny of “the backwash of war” and Benedict's Sand Queen), or the ethical and epistemological impasses at the heart of war writing (Tim O'Brien's “How to Tell a True War Story”). The analyses of Moby-Dick and Faulkner's A Fable, both against the critical grain, lay the foundations for one of the book's most incisive observations: the disavowal of a sacrificial ideology as the conditio sine qua non for resistance to war. This is a point to which we return in the final chapter, in Mariani's cautious yet unmistakable tribute to Turner's and Benedict's texts, whose “cosmopolitan” sensitivity goes some way towards dismantling the Manichaean opposition between friends and enemies.

With its unwavering insistence on the paradoxes that riddle our conceptualization and attitude to violence, this ambitious study is never less than thought-provoking. Mariani wears his erudition lightly: while theoretically rigorous, Waging War on War makes for a stimulating read also on the strength of its author's lucid style, engaging inquisitiveness and compassionate outlook. As a result, Mariani's contagious, passionate investment in the intellectual and moral questions raised by his subject shines through every page, and is a much welcome reminder – to this reader at least – of the profound relevance of literature, and its study, to our development as social animals and political agents.