Enemy Intimacies and Strange Meetings in Writings of Conflict 1800-1918

Propaganda others the enemy as brutish, brutal, and lacking in humanity. By contrast, a wealth of literary and first-hand writings present switches in which the enemy becomes, as Wilfred Owen famously put it, a ’strange friend’. This book focuses on moments of intimacy and reassessment between military enemies--truces, treatment of the wounded, relationships with prisoners of war. It is concerned with the work done by declarations of fellow feeling, both to challenge and enable militarism.

The book explores enemy intimacies in literature, philosophy, and life writings to ask questions about the nature of amity, enmity, familiarity, and otherness. It ranges across British conflicts of the long nineteenth century, a period in which ideas about the uniqueness of combat experience coalesced with a European effort to secure a distinctive version of so-called civilized humanity. The sense that soldiers of the other side, bonded by experiences unavailable to civilians, were ’just like us’ came into tension with views about the dissimilarity of other nations and races. This book considers which enemies can become familiar and which are held as other, investigating dividing lines of nation, race, religion, and culture.

Enemy Intimacies and Strange Meetings asks how far these affectively powerful encounters can shift individual and wider narratives about civilisation and humanitarianism. Attention to the violence that can be done by claiming and denying fellow feeling is held in tension with hope in the queer possibilities of reoriented compassion. This book uncovers a rich cultural history of enemy intimacies to consider different orientations of cosmopolitanism and humanitarian fellow feeling, while recognizing and explaining the ways in which full international kinship remains elusive.

Holly Furneaux, Professor of English Literature, Cardiff University

Holly Furneaux is Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University. She led the AHRC project, ’Strange Meetings: Enemy Encounters 1800-2020’. Her books include Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch and Masculinity in the Crimean War and Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities. She curated an exhibition--Created in Conflict: Soldier Art from the Crimean War to the Present--at Compton Verney in 2018 and was adviser to the BBC’s Dickensian (originally screened in 2015-16).