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In the run-up to, during and after the invasion of Iraq a large number of literary texts addressing that context were produced, circulated and viewed as taking a position for or against the invasion, or contributing political insights. This book provides an in-depth survey of such texts to examine what they reveal about the condition of literature.

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Acknowledgements Making War: Introduction ´Laws´ for Poets: Poetry Anthologies Exacting World: Individual Poetry Collections To Smash the Mirror: Theatre A Joint Enterprise: Fiction Windows into Life-Worlds: Blogs and Conclusion Conclusion Bibliography Index

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´Suman Gupta´s Imagining Iraq is brilliantly written, engaging, and authoritative. With a depth and tightness of focus that is really unusual, this book should be given serious attention by academics and students.´ - Jago Morrison, Senior Lecturer in English, Brunel University, UK

´An impressively thorough, theoretically sophisticated, thought-provoking account of the literature - poetry, fiction, drama, blogging - of the invasion of Iraq. The focus throughout is on what this writing tells us about the production, circulation and reception of literature in general, as well as about current notions of literary character and value.´

- Zachary Leader, Professor of English Literature, Roehampton University, UK

´In this valuable book, Gupta... engages with work in English that deals with the invasion of Iraq... In a balanced argument, the author acts out the anxieties the invasion created among publishers, authors, and readers, who debated heatedly about the possibility of making poetry subject to a political imperative...Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.´ - A. S. Jawad, Duke University, CHOICE

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SUMAN GUPTA Professor of Literature and Cultural History at the Open University, UK, and currently Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Roehampton University. Recent books include The Theory and Reality of Democracy: A Case Study in Iraq (2006), Social Constructionist Identity Politics and Literary Studies (2007), and Literature and Globalization (2009).

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