الفهرس 
Chapter One IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Iraq has suffered for a long time from the repercussions of war and political violence. The dissertation conducts a social-linguistic analysis of three novels: Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer, Rory McCharthy’s Nobody Told Us We Are Defeated: Stories from the New Iraq, and Kiven Powers’s The Yellow Birds. These novels depict the effects of political violence and why they are drawn to powerfully articulate the grueling reality and experience of those fictionally engaged in and affected by it. The representations of this war serve an important societal, cultural, aesthetic and symbolic function. Thus the study encapsulates how these novels reveal and recapture the physical, psychological, and interpersonal losses that are felt by the citizens and military alike. The Corpse Washer is a trauma novel. It bears witness to exposes the devastating effects of war. Antoon gives us a bleak portrait of Iraq as a battlefield and of the struggle of human spirit. He emerges as the chronicler of the Iraqi nightmare that has reduced Iraqis to corpses. Antoon creates and negotiates within a contextualized socio-cultural sphere work out the cultural identity as an in-between position at the borderlines of the Self and the other. The Yellow Birds builds on the recollections of John Bartle, a soldier who strives to cope with the death of Murph, his comrade-in-arms, by revisiting episodes that take place during deployment and by probing his own level of culpability, of moral and psychological weariness, after the return home. Remembrance is central in the novel that looks into the multifaceted exploration of memory as a means of creating a space for reconciliation with the past and of coming to terms with traumatic events. Nobody Told Us We Are defeated focuses deliberately and exclusively on Iraqis. It catches the voices of the ordinary people of Iraq to depict violence and war that Iraqis face under US occupation. McCarthy depicts the complexities of the political situation and events in Iraq.