(Inter)visualising war: an introduction

In this introduction, König outlines two key concepts at the heart of the volume: ‘visualising’ and ‘narrative interplay’. As she explains, ‘visualising’ war does not simply involve representing it; rather, ‘visualisation’ is a powerful, creative process which reframes and ‘envisions’ war, generating new understandings that inform the worlds we inhabit. She next underlines the inherent intertextuality of our habits of visualising war. In the tales they tell and the tropes they share, conflict narratives bring different cultures and communities into dialogue with each other, while also connecting different contexts and periods: later visualisations invariably respond to the earlier models on which they draw, and they expect their readers/viewers to do likewise. The volume's underlying premise, König explains, is that individual representations of conflict have always been constructed in dynamic relation to each other and that a proper understanding of war-storytelling as a formative cultural phenomenon requires interaction between different genres, media, historical periods and communities to be placed at the heart of discussions.