The Remembered Dead

Poetry, Memory and the First World War

Sally Minogue, Andrew Palmer

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781108428675
• eBook ISBN: 9781108595834
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Remembered Dead explores the ways poets of the First World War - and later poets writing in the memory of that war - address the difficult question of how to remember, and commemorate, those killed in conflict. It looks closely at the way poets struggled to meaningfully represent dying, death, and the trauma of witness, while responding to the pressing need for commemoration. The authors pay close attention to specific poems while maintaining a strong awareness of literary and philosophical contexts. The poems are discussed in relation to modernism and myth, other forms of commemoration (such as photographs and memorials), and theories of cultural memory. There is fresh analysis of canonical poets which, at the same time, challenges the confines of the canon by integrating discussion of lesser-known figures, including non-combatants and poets of later decades. The final chapter reaches beyond the war's centenary in a discussion of one remarkable commemoration of Wilfred Owen.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Table of contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 ‘But You Are Dead!’: Early Struggles over Representation
• Chapter 2 ‘The World’s Worst Wound’: Death, Consciousness and Modernism
• Chapter 3 ‘Fierce Imaginings’: The Radical Myth-Making of David Jones and Isaac Rosenberg
• Chapter 4 Memorial Poems and the Poetics of Memorialising
• Chapter 5 ‘Disquieting Matter’: The Unburied Corpse in War Poetry
• Chapter 6 ‘Horrors Here Smile’: The Poem, the Photograph and the Punctum
• Chapter 7 Dulce et Decorum Est
• Coda
• Bibliography
• Index