Great American Novel

Episode 29: Rallying Around the Flag in Stephen Crane's THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE


Listen Later

Send us a text

The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is a singularly unique war novel: whereas most depictions of the horrors of combat and the trauma of the battlefield are naturalistic, attempting to inflict upon the reader the violence the prose describes and terrifying us with the prospect that humans do not rise to heroic occasions, Stephen Crane's novel is impressionistic, blurring detail at the edges and giving scattershot glimpses of confusion, guilt, regret, and even envy and resentment. Through the story of Private Henry Fleming (aka "The Youth"), Red Badge is arguably the novel that best encapsulates the phrase "the fog of war," a term credited to the 19th-century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. In this episode we explore how Crane---who was not yet born when the battle of Chancellorsville that is the setting occurred---managed to capture the experience so authentically that Union veterans assumed he had worn the blue alongside them. The novel launched its twenty-four-year-old author into the type of fame few writers experience: as a journalist, pulp writer, and celebrity observer of international conflagrations (not to mention fan of bordellos), Crane epitomized the image of the author as a globetrotting adventurer---an image only elevated to tragic irony when he died from tuberculosis in 1900.   

...more
View all episodesView all episodes
Download on the App Store

Great American NovelBy Scott Yarbrough and Kirk Curnutt

  • 5
  • 5
  • 5
  • 5
  • 5

5

81 ratings


More shows like Great American Novel

View all
The Book Review by The New York Times

The Book Review

3,896 Listeners

The LRB Podcast by The London Review of Books

The LRB Podcast

294 Listeners

Overdue by Headgum

Overdue

2,206 Listeners

The Bill Simmons Podcast by The Ringer

The Bill Simmons Podcast

29,981 Listeners

The History of Literature by Jacke Wilson / The Podglomerate

The History of Literature

1,097 Listeners

The New Yorker Radio Hour by WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

The New Yorker Radio Hour

6,699 Listeners

The New Yorker: The Writer's Voice - New Fiction from The New Yorker by WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

The New Yorker: The Writer's Voice - New Fiction from The New Yorker

2,134 Listeners

Pod Save America by Crooked Media

Pod Save America

86,826 Listeners

The Daily by The New York Times

The Daily

111,150 Listeners

The Big Picture by The Ringer

The Big Picture

5,542 Listeners

SmartLess by Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, Will Arnett

SmartLess

57,734 Listeners

The Rest Is History by Goalhanger

The Rest Is History

13,535 Listeners

The Ezra Klein Show by New York Times Opinion

The Ezra Klein Show

15,543 Listeners

Reading McCarthy by Scott Yarbrough and Guest Hosts

Reading McCarthy

138 Listeners

The Zach Lowe Show by The Ringer

The Zach Lowe Show

1,959 Listeners