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“Like a nuclear blast”;: Fay Weldon's explosion of the military order in the Shrapnel Academy

In Tfie Social History of the Machine Gun (1975), John Ellis demonstrates that "[t]he history of technology is part and parcel of social history in general, [and t]he same is true of military history" (9). He argues, "[m]any 'liberal' historians have shied away from the analysis of military technology and its impact on our lives, because they find the subject distasteful" (2). Ellis's evaluation of "the consequences of developing and assimilating new weapons into culture" helps to reveal how material products are marginalized or utilized and encoded according to and within an ideological context (187). This text is notable for its intention to evaluate the way military technologies and tactics affect, effect, and are affected by our social and political environments. There is much to be done regarding the interplay between social and ideological history, militarism, and material military technology, specifically as represented in literature. However, this is a field of study all too often ignored by critics of literature, due to, in part, the aesthetic and ideological objections of us supposedly "soft liberals" (Weldon, TSA 166). Fay Weldon's The Shrapnel Academy (first published in 1986) demands extensive critical attention. Most specifically, The Shrapnel Academy calls for the kind of analysis that examines how this novel depicts the social and political history of militarism, and evaluates the implications of military technology regarding social and political structures and the human body. Along with other works in