"(Un)Civil War?" is a two-day colloquium on 17th and 18th June 2017, which will examine conflicts of the 20th and 21st centuries in order to question our perceptions of civility, violence, commemoration and human rights during war and ‘peace’. It will bring together academics from a range of disciplines under the broad umbrella of war studies, to explore the connotations and influence of ‘civility
’ on our understanding of war, civil war, and the use of political violence during peace. Current discussions in war studies explore how conflicts are both generic and specific – how ‘all wars are different and also the same’ – and the main aim of this symposium will be to explore whether there are specific and generic ways in which ‘civility’ is constructed and understood in different wars, and also in the relationship between peacetime civil rights’ movements and violence. The central focus of "(Un)Civil War?" will be literary: the conference will explore the language of war, civility and civil rights in (for the most part) Anglophone literature, both in response to war and proleptically. Sessions will examine, for example, how World War I discourses of heroism, disillusionment and the role of the poet/writer helped figure experiences of the Spanish Civil War, and shaped in advance literary responses to the Second World War; other sessions will explore the fictional imaginings of British Civil Wars and their relationship to the World Wars, and the relationship between Yeats’s poetry of the Irish Civil War and Seamus Heaney’s poetry of the Northern Irish Civil Rights’ movement, and the extent to which poetry’s engagement with violence changed through the century.
