Arms and the Woman: The Public Intellectual in Zoe Lambert’s The War Tour

Abstract

This article explores Zoe Lambert’s short story collection, The War Tour (2008), in relation to the debates surrounding the public intellectual and the literary response to the War on Terror. It makes a claim for Lambert’s collection to be considered not only as the work of a public intellectual but that it also contests what it means to be an intellectual at a time of historical crisis. In dwelling upon real-life figures such as the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg and the physicist Lise Meitner, Lambert also reflects upon her own position as a supporter of the Stop the War Coalition. The relationship to the public sphere is complicated by Lambert’s gender, and of the women that she writes about; a complication which not only unsettles the definition of a public intellectual but is also articulated through the oblique strategies of the short story collection.