Literature
First World War Fiction
First World War fiction refers to literary works, including novels and short stories, that are set during or inspired by the events of World War I. These works often explore the impact of the war on individuals and society, depicting the harsh realities of combat, the psychological effects on soldiers, and the broader social and political changes brought about by the war.
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12 Key excerpts on "First World War Fiction"
- Tim Dayton, Mark W. Van Wienen(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Whether indeed forgotten or just poorly remembered in America, the First World War absolutely mattered then and, though differently, it matters now. Anyone seeking a better understanding of the war and the impressions it left on Americans should read the fiction about it. American writers of fiction found in the First World War a deep and abiding subject. From its beginning in 1914 and for at least two decades after it ended in 1918, American fiction dramatized the country’s experiences in the Great War: the debates, protests, horrors, sacrifices, disillusionments, social 39 upheavals, modern ironies, contested meanings, courage at home and in combat, mistreatment of veterans, and even the imperfect memory and wild attempts to forget. No neat, single plot can summarize the contradic- tions and particularities in how Americans experienced and understood the First World War. Arguably that multiplicity makes this fiction all the more necessary, for as a whole it refuses to reduce a vast and terrible war to an easily digestible bromide. 2.1 Critical Recognition Literary critics have documented the diversity of American fiction that treats the war. A review of the scholarship on First World War American fiction can properly begin with Stanley Cooperman’s World War I and the American Novel (1967), which considers canonical and lesser-known novels, positioning a number of these as revulsions against the carnage of the war and the propaganda that obscured it. In many American novels Cooperman discerns a “hostility to idealism” (40) after prewar “hopes” for social and material progress burned in the cauldron of the war’s “savage absurdity” (45). Thus for Cooperman disillusion is characteristic of mod- ernist postwar fiction. This body of literature received fuller attention as later scholars expanded Cooperman’s scope to consider other novels and short stories while often contending with his conclusions.
- Charles N. Genno, Heinz Wetzel(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- University of Toronto Press(Publisher)
HERMANN BOESCHENSTEIN The First World War in German Prose after 1945: Some Samples -Some Observations Not surprisingly, the First World War continues to make its thematic appearance in German literature after 1945. People who personally ex-perienced the years from 1914 to 1918, either as soldiers or as civilians, are still with us. Anyone born before 1898 was liable to be conscripted; and, if still alive, he may retain vivid recollections of those fateful times and use them for literary purposes. Others who were children or adoles-cents during the war may, nevertheless, have felt its impact during their formative years. Autobiographical writing dealing with that period can hardly bypass the First World War. And while the time is coming when personal memories will have vanished, there will always be novelists with a preference for historical subjects who may go back to 1914. As yet no particular bias for the historical novel is needed to conjure up the First World War; any generation or family novel with a grandfather in it must, of necessity, reverberate to the shots of Sarajevo. The reappearance of the First World War - so many years after its enactment on the fields of Flanders, before Verdun, on the eastern plains, in the Isonzo valley, and on the oceans of the globe -tempts one to make some a priori assumptions. Is it not to be expected that the distance in time, even if it has not dimmed the vividness of the grim scenes on the battlefields, will at any rate mute or silence the optimistic ideological and emotional overtones, the pacifistic fervour we find in some of the earlier war novels? Writing after the Second World War, the faith in peace that prevailed at the time can still be mentioned in order to complete the record; but it can no longer be the basis of a passionate appeal to reshape the world, as it was after 1918.
- Ralf Schneider, Jane Potter, Ralf Schneider, Jane Potter(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
The Oxford History of the Novel in English. Part IV: The Novel 1914–1940. Eds. Patrick Parrinder and Andrzej Gasiorek. Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press, 2010. 401–416.4 The Short Story of the First World War
Ann-Marie EinhausAbstract
This chapter outlines the contribution made by short fiction to the representation and memory of the First World War. Drawing on short stories published between 1914 and the war’s centenary years, this chapter argues that short fiction can reveal as much about the multifaceted global experience of war as about the war’s shifting place in contemporary cultural memory. The short story of and about the First World War is explored both as an archive of experience and a mediator of memory.Key Terms: Memory, short fiction, publishing, global war, anthologies,1 Introduction: Functions and Definitions
Wartime and inter-war short stories about the First World War were written and published as part of a wider boom in short fiction, facilitated by the success of periodicals in Britain and elsewhere in the early twentieth century, which continued into the 1940s. As far as public attention and critical scrutiny go, the British short story about the First World War has been the poor cousin of writing about the war in other genres. Yet next to the war’s poetry it was in fact one of the most prolific genres in which the experience of war found expression. Like the treatment of the First World War in the British novel, its representation in short fiction did not stop with the end of the war, and this chapter discusses examples of First World War short fiction ranging from the war years to the centenary period. The First World War short stories discussed here were chosen to illustrate two things in particular: the relation of the short story to the war’s global nature, and to its evolving cultural memory. Just as the war’s memory originates in countless individual experiences and memories, short stories at the time offered a vast patchwork of views, aspects and nuances of the conflict. Over time, both the war’s collective memory and its literary canon became subject to rather similar processes of selective remembering and forgetting, and so we find ourselves confronted today with not only a limited cultural memory of the war that invited so many challenges and additions in the run-up to the centenary, but also a limited literary understanding of the First World War. Like buried but still accessible memories, short stories have the capacity to be rediscovered, to nuance and diversify our understanding of the war’s literary experience.
eBook - ePubThe Mediatization of War and Peace
The Role of the Media in Political Communication, Narratives, and Public Memory (1914–1939)
- Christoph Cornelissen, Marco Mondini, Christoph Cornelissen, Marco Mondini(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Oldenbourg(Publisher)
I. Visualization of War – Narratives of WarEuropean War Literature in a Transnational Perspective
Marco Mondini1 A writing bulimia. European output from the War
“Oh, what a literary war!”, Paul Fussel exclaimed, commenting on the extraordinarily literary language with which British troops narrated, assessed, and imagined the First World War1 . Position warfare, inevitably involving long hours of idleness in the trenches and a complete lack of entertainment at the front, consistently encouraged the Tommies fighting on the Western Front (most of all the young, well-cultivated reserve officers) to read and write. Britain was the country with the most literate male population at the beginning of the twentieth century, with a large market for novels and poems adapted for the lower classes at economic prices. It is therefore no surprise that the literary production in the English linguistic sphere (mostly English by nationality but with some Irish contributions) was prominent. More often than not, His Majesty’s infantrymen held some kind of qualification (no matter how basic) and their letters home could draw on widespread popular imagery of romantic inspiration, depicting war as a crusade against evil, or themselves as paladins on a quest to slay a dragon and restore peace, although in reality they were plagued by lice and fighting knee-deep in mud2 . The battlefield ceased to be a place of anonymous cruelty and meaningless destruction, instead developing an implicit comparison with an arena in which Christian knights could showcase their warlike virtues of valor, courage, and justice under God’s benevolence3 . In addition to a massive production of poems published by veterans (at least 800 titles), the war story was also well established in the cultural scenario by the 1930s when Cyril Falls compiled his annotated bibliography of First World War, noting about 700 titles. Nowadays this listing is considered methodologically unreliable because it mixes ego-documents, novels, official histories, and regimental diaries, but it does still give a measure of the role played by the war genre in the interwar period. The publishing industry was initially reluctant to accept them, but books describing the war experience (in particular memoirs and autobiographic novels) soon enjoyed considerable success4
eBook - PDFThe War That Used Up Words
American Writers and the First World War
- Hazel Hutchison(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Yale University Press(Publisher)
We validate artistry, style, and a dispassionate command of form, but we want to be told the truth. Its seems that writing, or even reading, about the First World War is (pardon the expression) something of a minefield. This book is about a group of American authors who observed the war in Europe between 1914 and 1918, and who wrote about what they saw. American writing from the First World War is not read as often as that from Britain or the other nations involved in the conflict, perhaps be-cause it defies many established cultural preferences and misconceptions about war literature. The most significant texts are by those who did not fight, who openly voiced their political agendas across a range of posi-tions, who believed in the power and the right of literature to sway public I n t r o d u c t i o n 3 perspectives, but who also felt that observing was not enough of a re-sponse to the demands of war: one should also act. American cultural memory of the war tends to be focused through the work of “lost genera-tion” writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, who actually had minimal exposure to frontline activities—Hemingway was an ambu-lance driver for only three weeks, while Faulkner and Fitzgerald never even got to Europe—and who did not write about it until the mid-1920s. Alternatively, readers often embrace the work of writers such as T. S. Eliot, H.D., or Ezra Pound, who were personally remote from the war, though alert to its effects, and who wrote about it obliquely. These writers are credited with inventing many of the literary techniques and stating the emotional positions which would come to be seen as central to the aes-thetic agendas of twentieth-century writing. Cultural observers usually agree that the First World War was a catalyst for dramatic changes in the theory and practice of literature, painting, dance, music, and architecture.
eBook - PDFThe Literature of the Great War Reconsidered
Beyond Modern Memory
- P. Quinn, S. Trout, P. Quinn, S. Trout(Authors)
- 2001(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
The cataclysm and its consequences could not be pushed aside. And the political considerations impinged heavily on the aesthetic ones. War literature was in effect mostly treated as sep- arate from other sorts of literature. Rarely does one come across a remark like H. M. Tomlinson’s: ‘The test for a book about the War is Beyond Fiction? 11 the same as for any other book’ . . . Fiction here had an immediate factual correlative of which millions were aware, and the overriding criterion applied to war fiction was truth. (4) This sense that writing about the War was not just ‘writing’ (i.e. was not in a separate artistic sphere from everyday experience) has continued in the critical treatment of its fiction. Here there is, of course, an interest in literary questions (the deployment of formal features, use of literary modes and models and so on), but this has always been accompanied by an interest in historical and cultural questions (what cultural factors created particular ways of describing the War? how did the experience of War modify literary responses? what impact did War fiction have on postwar history? and so on). But despite this sense of history (predating a more general critical turn towards history), the main focus has remained on works which are – or which can be said to be – literary or fictional. Such a focus can be jus- tified in various ways (probably mainly by arguing for the superiority of literary accounts), but justification of this kind is particularly problem- atic for fiction of the Great War, because a large number of the texts which have come to form a canonical corpus are, in fact, not obviously fictional at all. There is in various ways a quite clear awareness of this problem among critics. Klein’s Introduction says: These studies are concerned with war fiction. In view of the vastness of the material selection is necessary. And one of the principal non- national categories for comparative work is genre.
eBook - PDF- Ann-Marie Einhaus(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Later stories addressing the war, on the other hand, work with different assumptions and reflect the gradual change in perception of World War I within British society as time passed. By this I do not mean to suggest that these stories are mere reflections of changing trends; rather, they themselves assist in the process of change. The formation of a literary canon of First World War literature and of the war’s mythology were mutually influential. My basic assumption, based on what Jauss terms a ‘horizon of expectations’, is that writers are consciously or unconsciously working to such expectations, which inevitably change over time and are thus beyond their continued control. This assumption underpins the analysis of First World War short Canon, genre, experience, and the implied reader 25 fiction in the following chapters. While it is impossible to quantify read- ers’ actual responses beyond the very general notion that what was fre- quently published must have sold well and would have been read by large audiences, it is possible to infer a horizon of expectations from the texts and their contexts. By making frequent references to newspaper articles, historical source material and writing about the war in other genres, I am looking at the different kinds of questions that contemporary and subsequent generations of readers may have put to these short stories and continue to put to them, in the light of the answers the stories can and do provide. One of the reasons this book focuses primarily on what can be called popular or even formula literature – magazine short stories written for those in search of light entertainment – is that such stories were par- ticularly widely available. Moreover, as Jauss points out, it is rarely the avant-garde literary masterpiece that best expresses contemporary moods and sentiments.
- Ralf Schneider, Jane Potter, Ralf Schneider, Jane Potter(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
Such questions will address the authenticity of the events imagined or represented and inquire whether Realism as a literary device is unavoidable in war novels. They will ask for the stability of the narrator(s) of the texts, a stability that would be very much at odds with their position as existentially endangered human subjects inside an inhu-mane living (and dying) environment. Thirdly, they will address the position of the im-plied reader(s) of the novels. Who is addressed by them and how? What is the imagined audience for which these texts were written? That this is not an anachronistic form of critical sophistry will become evident when one realises that the impossibility of com-municating war experience also assumes an important role inside the war narratives themselves. Finally, and admittedly sketchily, the chapter will ask about the present and future role of First World War novels. That they are still written today is evident, and it is likely that they will continue to be produced in the future. But with which motivation and to what avail? Rather than as a satisfyingly solid historical object of knowledge, the present section will therefore portray the novel of the First World War as a dynamic and frequently irritating field of conflicting discourses. 2 A Challenge to Established Models Although Realism in literature emerged in the eighteenth century, Realism in war nar-ratives took longer to develop. The reason is most likely that war is a highly ideologi-cally charged subject matter that combines many crucial areas of cultural (self-)identi-fication. It comprises issues of individual identity, gender issues (predominantly, though not exclusively, those of masculinity), concepts of class (in the hierarchies that the military displays, many of which directly mirror the class structures of con-temporaneous societies), all the way to issues of politics, nationality, but also those of economy, religion, etc.
eBook - PDF- Kate Agnew, Geoff Fox(Authors)
- 2001(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
The First World War The closing decades of the twentieth century saw a proliferation of novels for young readers which examined the Second World War and its aftermath, but over the same period relatively few novels have been published for this readership which dealt with the First World War. The success of Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong (1993) and Pat Barker's Regeneration (1991) - and its sequels -signifies the depth of adult interest in literary fiction about the First World War. The opening of Regeneration which portrays the continuation of war as 'evil and unjust' reflects the attitude towards the war prevalent in contemporary children's novels. Those novels for a younger audience published in recent years rarely seek to paint an overtly patriotic picture of the nation at war or to promote the values espoused by First World War novels written earlier in the century. Contemporary novels are frequently critical of the planning behind the war, painting a grim picture of the huge loss of life suffered by both sides in the trenches and on the battlefields. For many authors the First World War is depicted with a curious blend of sorrow, excitement and bewilderment. The tension between the sense of emancipation -particularly for young women or for those who had worked as servants before the war - and despair at the seemingly endless loss of life, is at the core of many recent British children's novels about the First World War. The patriotic mood of the time in which the public desired its young men to act heroically and its young women selflessly is contrasted poignantly CHAPTER 2 56 CHILDREN AT WAR with the blood, sweat and tears of the battlefield scenes. Late twentieth-century children's novels present their protagonists not as heroic or saintly figures, but as ordinary people caught up in terrible events. Often uncertain of the ethics of the war they fight, frequently afraid and exhausted, the young heroes and heroines exhibit moral as much as physical courage.
eBook - PDFBritish Children's Literature and the First World War
Representations since 1914
- David Budgen(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
36 Moreover, ‘he tells of that wonderful return to battle of men who, according to all the laws of warfare, and the German belief, were broken and defeated’. 37 The grinding down of gigantic armies, was horrific, but there were other areas of the conflict that could be interpreted through old-fashioned notions of warfare, ideas that conformed to rules of combat and plucky heroism. In his famous critique of boys’ story papers, the journalist and author George Orwell summarized the contents of such publications: Examination of a large number of these papers shows that, putting aside school stories, the favourite subjects are Wild West, Frozen North, Foreign Legion, Crime (always from the detective’s angle), the Great War (Air Force or Secret Service, never the infantry), the Tarzan motif in varying forms, professional football, tropical exploration, historical romance (Robin Hood, Cavaliers and Roundheads, etc), and scientific invention. 38 In other words, boys’ fiction concentrated on scenarios that were both exciting and completely removed from everyday life. Writers did not stop producing works that Interwar Children’s Fiction 83 depicted the events of the First World War after 1916, but many of the stories that were published shifted the emphasis onto areas of the conflict that were both more palatable and more exciting to young readers. Flying and spying hardly reflected the experiences of the majority during the Great War, but they became more prominent themes in children’s fiction. Before the outbreak of the First World War, Percy Westerman’s speciality had been the maritime story, and he had written thirteen novels set in the conflict at sea. His final Great War-set novel gave some indication as to his new direction: Winning His Wings: A Story of the R.A.F. (1919). As was seen in Chapter 3, the war in the air was one of the most romantic aspects of the Great War, especially when compared with the carnage and heavy losses of the Western Front.
eBook - ePubNarratives of War
Remembering and Chronicling Battle in Twentieth-Century Europe
- Nanci Adler, Remco Ensel, Michael Wintle, Nanci Adler, Remco Ensel, Michael Wintle(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Part IIIThe Development and Deployment of War Narratives
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First World War Novels and Veteran Memory Dunja Dušanić7 The War Books Controversy Revisited
The sudden eruption of war books that swept through Europe at the end of 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s was one of the most widely discussed aspects of the ‘boom’ of cultural production prompted by the tenth anniversary of the 1918 Armistice. In those years, the literary market was overwhelmed to the point that Louis Aragon, complaining in 1930 of an offensive comeback of war literature, diagnosed that war was again à la mode. 1 Although almost every piece of writing published on the subject of the Great War seemed to get an unprecedented amount of attention from the readers and the press, in the copious and varied production of war books, novels tended to elicit the strongest emotional response and incite the loudest polemics.The debates on war novels, also known in Britain as the ‘War Books Controversy’, seemed to be centred on the representation of the First World War in recent fiction, particularly on its ‘truthfulness’. This highly elusive notion was used to refer to everything from the novels’ factual accuracy to their ideological content, but most often served as a pretext for moving the discussion away from the actual texts and onto a different, extra-literary terrain. At first glance, then, both the focus and the vigour of the controversy appear more as symptoms of a serious crisis of memory than as a reaction to any particular feature of the actual novels. And yet, while one might be inclined to agree that they were indeed signs of ‘a perplexed international self-commiseration’2 and ‘a deep anxiety about the future of the political, moral, and cultural order’,3 they were not generated by the political climate of the interwar years alone. The War Books Controversy was, as Samuel Hynes observed, ‘a quarrel over history; but it was also a literary dispute’.4
eBook - PDFFord Madox Ford and the Misfit Moderns
Edwardian Fiction and the First World War
- R. Hawkes(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
The remarkable proliferation, identified by Saunders, of texts which experi- mented with the forms of fiction and non-fiction during the long turn of the twentieth century – and particularly in response to the First World War – must also be seen in this context. If the phenomenon that Saunders describes as autobiografiction cannot be regarded as a genre, it can an should be regarded as a significant trend in modern writing. Of course, all First World War narratives do not contain the same destabilising tendencies as Ford’s No Enemy. Despite engaging in certain fictionalising tendencies in the way that it shapes and struc- tures its material, Graves’s Goodbye to All That leaves the reader in lit- tle doubt as to its status as autobiography. Sassoon’s Memoirs is more equivocal since it seems to offer itself as fiction (through the fiction- alisation of names and the significant differences between Sherston’s character and Sassoon’s) and yet it is generally received as non-fiction. Nevertheless, taken together all three texts demonstrate the varying degrees to which autobiografictional experimentation manifests itself in First World War memoirs. As I have argued, uncertainties surround- ing the genre of a text are fundamentally bound up with the question of trust. Since the reliance on trust is also intrinsic to the modern condition then texts which problematise generic boundaries are also peculiarly reflective of the uncertainties of the modern age. Although the distinction between fiction and non-fiction may not be, strictly speaking, a generic distinction, it is a one that produces horizons of expectation and, hence, elicits trust on the behalf of readers. As we have seen, despite remaining a fundamental and necessary one, the border line between fiction and non-fiction is not one without areas of profound uncertainty, and what matters most in the face of uncer- tainty is the capacity to trust.
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