My dissertation, "Gender and National Identity in American War Narratives," explores the intersection of gender and genre in American War narratives from the Vietnam War to the present day, focusing on the way that women's incorporation into the American military contributed to both the transformation and redefinition of American masculinity and, by extension, America proper. Building on Susan Jeffords's tenet that "War is a crucible for the distillation of social and cultural relations," this project interrogates the manner in which literary representations of war both reflect and help constitute the American gender system and the way this system in turn offers a historical commentary on inflections of American national identity. It also investigates the ideological complexities particular to war writing as genre, exploring identity politics and the tension surrounding issues of an author's status as veteran or civilian, considering what set of generic criteria constitutes and defines a war narrative, and chronicling the specific inflections of war narratives at particular historical moments. Gender is a principal concern of war narratives, and this project follows that concern by identifying a taxonomy of sub-genres of the war narrative, ranging from what I term the direct participation narrative, the account of one who experiences the war directly, to the mediated narrative, the story of a person who strives to understand someone else's war experience, and by analyzing the way those sub-genres reveal a gendering of the war narrative, both on the level of representational content and on the level of form. This work also explores the prevalence of a generic preference that dictates fidelity to the historical referent of the war being depicted. Authors may (and certainly do) fictionalize war; however, as this work argues, such fictionalization remains tightly constrained by generic conventions and broader ideological considerations of which they form a part. Although no text exists in a vacuum, the war narrative's attempt to represent a geopolitical and historical moment that carries real-life (and real death) consequences enacts a particular set of constraints as it represents America, its people, and that for which they will wage war.