Visual Discourses of War: A Multimodal Approach

This book is a multimodal critical discourse analysis of visual discourses of war realized in different genres of communication in Britain, the US, and Europe over the last 150 years. It argues that while there has been extensive work produced on the linguistic realization of discourses of war, for example through the speeches of politicians and official documents, there has been a lack of attention to the way that these discourses are disseminated visually through a range of genres of communication. It argues that war and conflict are legitimized not just in official speeches and news texts but through toys, photography, news footage, computer war games, war monuments, and sites of heritage tourism. The book shows how discourses of war have changed over time and how the visual has a particularly important role due to its less denotative and more symbolic nature as compared to language.