“The Youth of this Tale”: Stephen Crane’s Meta-Narrative of War in The Red Badge of Courage

This is a reading of the brief, but quite significant, metafictional gesture in Stephen Crane’s renewed war novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895). This metafictional gesture has gone unnoticed in spite of the prestigious bulk of Crane scholarship over the last hundred years. This incorporated metafictional gesture open the text of the novel to new insights on Crane’s cultural and aesthetic politics. A wide range of critical spectrum is invoked in this paper to uncover the full significance of this aspect of Crane’s novel.